Molly Fox's Birthday (3 page)

As soon as my finals were over at university, I took a job teaching English as a foreign language. All my classes were finished by lunchtime every day, and I spent my evenings and nights working on the play. I remember it as a time of great contentment. I wrote the play easily and quickly; I enjoyed doing it. I thought it would always be like this. I didn't know that forever after it would be a struggle to find the right words, the right form, that this sudden fluency was a gift, never to be repeated. If someone had told me this at the time, how would I have reacted? I'd probably have laughed at them.
Youth is wasted on the young
.

Summer with Lucy
was a simple play, a two-hander, requiring a single set and providing two good roles for women. One of the characters was based on me; was a sharper, more witty and ironic me, someone whose
esprit
didn't wait until
l'escalier
. The other character was based on Lucy. I think I more than did her justice. I think I did her a favour. The ‘real' Lucy was ultimately rather a dull girl, peevish and whingeing, with a distinct lack of imagination. I resented the choices and chances her wealth
gave her and which she failed to realise. The Lucy I created was a far more complex personality, manipulative, intelligent, vulnerable and sly. The relationship she had with my fictional alter ego was edgier than it had been in real life, with a much stronger bond developing between the two characters and an underlying sense of violence. I knew when I finished it that I'd written a good play.

But I didn't realise just how good until it was accepted by Bread and Circus, the first company to which I sent it, and I attended the read-through.

Is there a more nerve-wracking, a more anxiety-inducing experience possible than first read-through? If so, I hope never to have to endure it. As an actor friend once remarked to me, ‘It makes going on a blind date feel like yoga.' I think this is why I have no memory of actually meeting Molly, and this is something I very much regret. I can recall being there in the rehearsal room with her. ‘It's so cold in here. Why is it always so cold? Does this thing work at all?' and she dragged the old gas heater across the floor, then hammered at the buttons on the side to try and switch it on. She helped me to a mug of bad coffee and asked me if I wanted milk. I was so nervous that I said no, even though I hate black coffee. All her initial conversation with me struck me as bland and oblique. I found her aloof. She chatted more with Ellen, the young woman who was to play ‘my' character, and who, as a fellow member of the company, was an old friend of hers. I would like to be able to recall being introduced to her, the first words we addressed to each other, but in truth it's all lost now.

The read-through itself, though, remains vividly in my mind. Ellen was a fine actor, but Molly was outstanding. Even in that first raw attack on the text, she lifted the
whole thing to a new level. I had thought I knew everything – absolutely everything – there was to know about this play, which, after all, I and I alone had written. It was strange to realise that this was not the case. It was like being a composer and hearing the symphony one had, until then, heard only in one's mind, being suddenly played by a full orchestra, and being taken aback by its depth and resonance, far greater than one could ever have expected. In the course of the hour and a half that the read-through lasted, Molly became Lucy; and in doing so she reminded me, weirdly, of the real Lucy, of the lost and lonely child who had trailed around behind me in the apartment during that hot London summer.

As I have already said, I don't know how actors do what they do, so Molly's interpretation that day seemed almost magical to me, and yet I did wonder, as I was to wonder all through the weeks of rehearsal, what was the secret. It was only while watching her from the wings one night, months later, when the play was already a hit, that I realised one important part of the mystery. It was compassion. Molly never judged a character. I had, at best, felt pity for Lucy, but Molly felt something more. No matter how difficult or unpleasant a character might seem, she could find in herself an understanding of why someone might be as they were and this enabled her to become them.

The read-through ended. Ellen brought the flat of her hand down hard on the table to represent the slamming of the door that ended the play and we all sat in silence for a few moments. Then Molly tossed her script down and threw her arms wide. ‘We're all going to be famous!' she said.

It's the sort of foolish, camped-up and half-joking remark any ambitious young woman might make, but it was a memorable moment because she spoke no more than the truth. Within the year Molly, Ellen and I were if not exactly household names then certainly much talked about by anyone with even a passing interest in theatre. As soon as
Summer with Lucy
opened it became a word-of-mouth hit, a sensation. The first run sold out almost immediately, we revived it later that year in a bigger theatre with similar success. We took it to festivals both at home and abroad, and we all won awards. I was commissioned to write my second play; Molly and Ellen were courted with offers of prestigious roles; in short, we were on our way, launched with as much glory and honour as anyone could desire. Of the three of us, it was actually Ellen who became most famous with the general public in the long run. She moved into television work and made her name in a police drama watched by millions. On the day of the read-through she and the director had somewhere to go afterwards, and so it was to me alone that Molly said, ‘Will we go and have a proper cup of coffee, instead of this sludge?'

At her suggestion, we went to the café where I had seen her sitting reading. ‘I like this place,' she said artlessly, ‘I come here all the time.' Our friendship began there on that day, and the café became a place to which we would often go together, or where we would arrange to meet. I found her much warmer than I had before the read-through, yet still she was reserved. At a nearby table someone had lit a cigarette, and the smoke drifted incessantly towards us. Molly fanned it away with her hand, but I could see that she found it increasingly irritating,
until at last I said, ‘Why don't I just go over and ask them to stub it out?' She looked at me with alarm. ‘No, don't. They might get annoyed.'

‘Well, their smoke's annoying us.'

She grasped my forearm to stop me moving. ‘Don't, please don't. I can cope, really, it's not a problem.' She pleaded with me so vehemently that I felt I had no option but to do as she wished, and let the cigarette smoke drift on. But her behaviour puzzled me, and as we resumed our conversation, at the back of my mind I kept wondering about this. Suddenly it came to me. I knew it was the truth and yet it was a shock:
Molly Fox was shy
.

How could this be? I had seen her on stage only a few weeks earlier before more than a hundred people …

While I had been remembering all of this, drifting in and out of sleep, the radio had been idling. It was seven-thirty, the announcer now said, cutting into my thoughts. He read the news headlines with an air of incredulity, as if even he could hardly believe the horrors – political breakdown, hurricanes, house fires and car crashes – he was sharing with the nation. I rose and went to the bathroom, taking the radio with me. Even though here too Molly had urged me to make free with what was available, I didn't use any of her rose-scented bath oil in its bottle of smoked glass, the label hand-written in French. By the time I had washed and dressed the weather forecast was being read: it was to be a sunny day, warm and dry. I picked up the radio to take it down to the kitchen with me. I passed the door of the room where I had set up my computer and where I had been attempting to work in recent days. Enough: I could think of that later.

The stairs were carpeted with tough sea-grass and on the return stood a grandfather clock with a big pale face on which the name of the maker and the word
Dublin
was painted in a flowing hand; above this was a picture of the moon. The clock struck eight as I passed, dissonant against the pips of the radio. Then the newsreader gave the headlines again and more comprehensive details of the troubles of the world, which he still clearly found hard to believe. The usual scatter of letters was missing from the hall mat, reminding me again that it was Saturday.

In the kitchen I made coffee and toast, squeezed orange juice and boiled an egg. While waiting for it I set a tray, and when everything was ready I carried it out into the back garden. There was music again now. The piano had given way to contrapuntal singing, ancient and pure in high clear voices, evoking the grey cold of an empty cathedral, the shimmering light of a rose window. The back garden was much larger than the front, and quite different in its character. It was long, rectangular and confined by stout stone walls against which grew all manner of trailing plants: ivies and vines, sweet pea and climbing roses. There was a laburnum tree and beneath it metal chairs and a table topped with mosaic, where I settled down with the breakfast tray.

Near to the wall on the right-hand side was a row of fruit bushes, raspberries, gooseberries and blackcurrants. Molly told me she had planted these after reading a description in an estate agent's window of a house for sale ‘with mature soft-fruit garden'. A more original and plausible come-on, we agreed, than ‘fine, well proportioned rooms', or even ‘paddock with own donkey', something
that would be irresistible even to people who didn't know what a paddock was. And so even though she knew that what was meant was probably little more than a few tatty raspberry canes, a couple of mildewed currant bushes, she decided at once that she too would have to have such a thing. ‘And until such time as they grow,' she had said, gesturing towards them, ‘this is my
immature
soft-fruit garden. In the meantime, we can enjoy the raspberries.'
Raspberries
: she drew from the word all of its crushed and bleeding sweetness, its soft and jewelled redness.

At the other end of the garden there was a black-and-white cow. When I arrived at the house to stay some four days earlier Molly had still been there. As we stood talking in the kitchen while she made tea, I happened to glance out of the window and couldn't believe what I saw. Why was there a cow in her garden? How had it got there, given that the only ways in were either through the house or over the high stone walls? ‘What is it?' she asked, for I had broken off in mid-sentence. She saw the look on my face and laughed. ‘Don't worry, you're not the first to be taken in.'

The cow was made of fibreglass. Molly said she had seen it outside a junk shop and had known at once that she had to have it. ‘Isn't it fabulous?' she said and she laughed again, staring out at the cow, her brown eyes shining and her whole face animated with delight. It was, I agreed. It was fabulous.

This was a lie. The fake cow was absurd, and it baffled and astonished me that Molly of all people should buy such a thing and put it in her garden. I mean, what was the
point
of it? Even a real cow seemed a more sensible, if less practical, idea. What bothered me most about this
was that I had thought I knew Molly well. We had been friends for over twenty years now, and with the exception of Andrew, she was the last person I would have expected to go in for this type of whimsy. It was out of keeping with the style of the rest of the house, with its kilims and mirrors, its trays of beaten brass and low dark tables of solid wood. Sitting now at breakfast, staring at the cow, I wondered why I hadn't said this to her. I had always thought we knew each other well enough to be completely honest, at least about something as trivial as this.

I couldn't help wondering what Andrew would make of it. I have known Andrew ever since we were undergraduates together at Trinity. I was ostensibly reading for a degree in English Literature, but most of my time was taken up with student theatricals or sitting in my bedsit writing; for I was already determined to be a dramatist. My infrequent trips to the library were usually occasioned by a frantic need to study because of a deadline for an essay, or a tutorial paper to be prepared. Unlike some of my friends, I did not go there night after night to idle away my time: when I went to the library I really needed to get work done. I got into the habit of sitting in the Art History department because I knew I wouldn't meet any of my friends there and be distracted into wasting time in long whispered conversations. Art History also had the advantage of being nearer the exit than the English section, making it more convenient for the frequent coffee breaks that to me were essential.

I was aware of Andrew long before I spoke to him or knew who he was. I came to realise that no matter how early I went to the library (admittedly never that early) he was always there before me and at night he never left
until the library closed. He habitually sat at the same desk. Surrounded by fortifications of books, great tomes on Romanesque architecture or medieval illuminations, he looked and had the air of a man under siege and toiled with a diligence at which I could only marvel. I remember that he had a silver fountain pen that he kept in a slim wooden box. He removed and replaced it with great ceremony – even then chipped and chewed biros would have been out of the question for Andrew. In time I came to like sitting near him because he created a force field of concentrated energy around himself into which one was drawn. I was less likely to daydream or doodle in the margins when under his influence. He also policed the area, and people who giggled or whispered would be ordered, in a marked Belfast accent, to stop. This was how I discovered that he was also from the north. He was tall and quite heavily built, with thick dark-blond hair that he would ruffle with his hands as he worked, so that by the end of most evenings he looked like a man who had had a bad fright.

‘If you give me one of those cigarettes, I'll buy you a coffee.' He insists that those are the first words I ever spoke to him, although I can't remember it myself. It certainly sounds like me, and would tally with my idea that we first fell into conversation on a coffee break at the library doors. We came to acknowledge each other with a smile when I entered or left the library; we came to arrange our coffee breaks so that they coincided. I developed a Masonic gesture – the right hand held somewhat claw-like, the left closed but for an extended, slightly parted index and middle finger – to suggest it was time to stop for a drink and a smoke. He almost
always accepted, and from time to time he would also accept one of the apples I usually had in my bag in those days, as an emergency food supply. But while I, once away from the books, would have been quite happy to sit chatting outside the library for the rest of the evening, Andrew would always look at his watch after exactly fifteen minutes and announce it was time for us to go back in.