Molly Fox's Birthday (5 page)

‘I faced him with it and I argued with him.' I was just about to ask Andrew what he was going to do about it, and then I realised that I didn't want to know. ‘I told my
father as well but he already knew; I think he knows even more than he's letting on. He's worried, I can tell. Billy's in deep. Anyway,' he said, remembering the train of conversation that had brought him to this point, ‘that's families for you, or at least that's my family. I'm stuck with them and they're stuck with me. Blood's thicker than water, I suppose.'

Does Andrew remember that night when we confided in each other, just after I broke Henry's heart? I'll never know, because were I to ask him, I'm sure he'd have the courtesy to pretend he had forgotten, unlike my mother who, to this day, casts Henry up to me. But it did mark a new stage in our friendship.

We never went to each other's houses, and for a long time college and a few selected pubs and cafés in the city centre remained our common ground. I didn't even know exactly where he lived until one day, in third year, when I had been bringing lecture notes to a friend in Rathmines who was ill and was afraid of falling behind with her work. God only knows what use my lecture notes would have been to anyone. Looking back it seems that everyone I knew at university was studying hard except me. It was late on a Saturday afternoon in winter, a bitterly cold day. Already the sun was beginning to set, a hard red that stained the few clouds pink and made the clear sky radiant, when I saw Andrew walking towards me, with great clusters of supermarket shopping bags dangling from his hooked fingers. We fell into conversation but almost immediately he suggested, because he was laden and because it was too cold to stand talking for long, that we go to his house, which was quite near. He was sharing a flat with two other students, in a house of faded elegance.
It had an imposing flight of steps and a fanlight over the door, but it also had four dustbins in the weedy front garden and a remarkable number of doorbells. ‘With luck the others will be out,' he said as he turned the key in the lock, but there was a bike in the hall and we could hear the television blaring in the front room, and voices and laughter from the kitchen at the end of the hall. He frowned in annoyance, gestured with his head towards the stairs, and said ‘Go up to my room; it's the one on the left. We'll have peace to talk there.'

His room faced west and was flooded with the livid pink light of the setting sun. It gave the place, indeed it gave the whole encounter that day, a curious atmosphere that makes the memory of it particular even now, some twenty years later. It was as though even as we were living it, it was already a little episode outside of time. I felt suddenly shy to be there and was glad he had told me to go upstairs first so that I could get used to being there in his room before he joined me. The room was exactly as I should have expected it to be, and every place where he has lived since then has had something of the same air to it, has been a place of scholarship and restrained aestheticism, the mirror of an ordered mind. Of course it has to be said that in other ways there is no compare, for his room then was the room of a student with very little money and his home now is the house of a rich and successful man.

I realise that a certain school of thought says that who we are is something we construct for ourselves. We build our self out of what we think we remember, what we believe to be true about our life; and the possessions we gather around us are supposedly a part of this, that we are,
to some extent, what we own. I have always been, and still am, hugely resistant to these ideas, because, I think, they are so much at odds with the Catholic idea of the self with which I was raised. I still believe that there is something greater than all our delusions about ourselves, all our material bits and pieces, and that this is where the self resides. But if anyone can give me pause in this argument, it's Andrew, the most patently and successfully self-constructed person I have ever met.

His room, on that winter afternoon so long ago, had a curious air of stillness because of the pink light. The high windows were uncurtained. The most evident piece of furniture was the desk which, like the desk he usually occupied in the college library, was stacked high with books about fine art. His precious fountain pen was there too in its wooden box. A drinking glass held other pens and pencils; there was an angled desk lamp with a cream shade. The single bed, with its dark red paisley spread, seemed to be masquerading as a couch by day. There were three chairs, one a battered but comfortable looking armchair, the others hard kitchen chairs, one of which was at the desk; the other had been pressed into service as a bedside table. A fire had been set with sticks and twisted newspapers in a small iron grate that I supposed was original to the house. There were coloured tiles showing stylised flowers along the sides of the fireplace, and a bale of turf briquettes stacked neatly alongside it. The whole room was neat and tidy, staggeringly so, when I thought of the way my brothers had kept their rooms, my benchmark then for the domestic arrangements of young men and not, I think, untypical. What made it more surprising still was that Andrew had not been expecting callers. I
doubted that I could have brought my own abode to this degree of order even with a few days' notice. Beside the wardrobe, a poor piece of workmanship, was a row of shoes, and looking at them I was struck by the strange pathos of someone's possessions when the person themselves is absent.

I wandered around the room while I waited for him, examining the spines of the books in his little bookcase, then crossing to the desk where a textbook lay open. On facing pages were black-and-white photographs of the facades of two cathedrals, Chartres and Amiens, and I wondered how he made sense of them. I would have had nothing to say about those dense concentric arcs of stone carvings, all those thickly crowded angels and saints; it would have bored me even to think about it. With that, Andrew came into the room. ‘I should have told you to light the fire.' He set down the tray of coffee and biscuits he was carrying and knelt down, lit the paper. Quietly it took, then the fire-lighters concealed beneath the sticks caught and we both stared at the licking flames, as the wood crackled. ‘You have no curtains,' I remarked, and he looked up at the window as if he were only noticing this now. ‘I took them down. Horrible Seventies things – sort of big brown swirls with orange blobs. Couldn't live with them and anyway, I like the light in the morning. Wardrobe's rubbish too but what can you do?'

As he spoke he started to build a small wigwam of briquettes over the flames, and then he stood up and switched on the desk lamp. The sky was growing darker, but because of the lamp and the flames of the firelight, the light in the room was still peculiar in a way I loved. I found myself wishing it could stay like that, in the foolish
way I had wished for things when I was a child. For I wanted the night not to come, I wanted this peaceful stillness, illuminated so perfectly, to go on and on. I think I could understand then why he liked certain paintings so much, for that closed, perfected world that they offered. He asked if I wanted him to put on some music and I said no, I was happy with things as they were. We sat for a while in companionable silence, watching the flames of the fire. He lived on a quiet side street, and from time to time we could hear buses and cars rumble past on the main road out from the city.

He told me that he was going to a party that night. Any impression I may have given of a dour introvert is wholly inaccurate. Andrew was an aesthete but not an ascetic. He liked a party or a pint as much as many another; and he had his own circle of friends, people who happened not to be friends of mine. He also had an essay to write, and was planning to spend the Sunday working on it. I told him frankly that I didn't know how he endured his studies, but instead of becoming defensive or annoyed he seemed to relish the challenge of sharing his enthusiasm. ‘Let me show you just how interesting it can be.'

He selected a book from the pile on his desk and leafed through it, found the painting he required. It was an Annunciation, a simple image, deceptively simple I realised, as he talked me through it. He explained the iconography and the composition, how things were harmoniously arranged in a way of which the viewer was not immediately conscious, but which subtly made their effect nonetheless. He told me something of the biography of the painter, his place in the art of his time. In spite of myself I became fascinated, and I could see how much
Andrew was enjoying himself too. Now that he is regularly on television, teaching people about art with the same easy brilliance, it pleases me to think that I was his first pupil. We drank the coffee and smoked, sat by the fire together for an hour and more. It was a happy afternoon, and when I was leaving I told him to have a good time at the party. I hope he did. Although neither of us knew it at the time he needed a little bulwark of pleasure in his life to set against what was about to befall him two days later.

I slept in for my nine-o'clock lecture on Monday and was bumbling around the kitchen, still in my dressing gown, when the phone rang. As soon as Andrew spoke I knew by the sound of his voice that something was seriously wrong. He asked me if I had heard the news headlines that morning and I said that I had. ‘That man,' he said, ‘the man who was shot, the body they found on the mountain – that was Billy.'

I'm ashamed to say that this murder had barely registered with me when I'd heard it on the radio, for such events were a commonplace in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and '80s. One became numb to them and only became aware of the full creeping horror when, as now, there was a personal connection. Andrew told me that Billy's name would be released later that day and that he was ringing his friends so that they wouldn't learn of it first through the media. He rightly scoffed at my suggestion that I might go to Belfast for the funeral. Two days later I saw a report of it on the television news. I glimpsed Andrew emerging from a tiny redbrick house, supporting his mother, with his head bowed. Billy had been murdered as part of a Loyalist paramilitary feud. He had been abducted on the Saturday night and shot, his body
dumped on the mountains above the city, where it was found late on the Sunday night.

What shocked me most when Andrew returned to college the following week was not his sorrow but his anger. He was full of a rage he could just about keep under control and he brushed aside my condolences with a sardonic laugh. I wasn't hurt, for I understood how complex and poisoned his grief must be for his only brother who had also been his rival, his enemy; and whose murder had made his own situation within his family even more painful than it already was. He didn't speak of it, how could he? He became more absorbed in his studies than ever before.

All this came back to me as I sat in Molly's garden on the morning of her birthday over the ruins of breakfast; over the broken eggshell in its cheery little egg-cup, a thing such as a child might like, made of thick pottery with the name
Molly
painted on it in primary colours. The speckled light came down through the leaves of the trees and trembled on the table top. The morning was moving along but I wasn't moving with it. I would have been happy to sit there for at least another hour just thinking about the past, but I knew that if I let more time slip away, I would regret it later. I carried the breakfast tray into the house and started to tidy up. As I did the dishes I glanced from time to time out into the garden, at the raspberry canes and the shaded table, at that ridiculous fake cow. Being in the house was the next best thing to being with Molly herself. She loves her home with an extraordinary kind of psychic intensity, and her whole sense of self, her identity, is intimately bound up with it in a way I had thought only possible when a house had been in a family
for generations. That sense of gratitude to the dead who had planted those trees, those roses, who had chosen those possessions, simple perhaps – the floral plates that have been in the back of the cupboard time out of mind, those plain white candlesticks – gratitude and a sense of obligation to the future: there is none of that here. All of this is Molly's choice and her creation, and she inhabits this space so fully that as I stood there with my hands in the hot suds I suddenly felt that she was there with me, even though I knew that this was impossible, that she was in New York. I sensed Molly's spiritual presence as completely as I had failed to sense Lucy's physical presence in that London apartment all those years ago, so much so that I turned away from the sink and looked behind me.

There was nobody there, of course. There was only the kitchen table where Molly and I had sat together for so many hours over all the years we had known each other. It was at this table that she had first told me about her family. Her mother had been absent from her life since very early on, although she was vague and elusive as to why that should have been the case. She had one sibling, a younger brother named Fergus, who threw a great shadow over her life and was a constant source of worry. Fergus was helpless where she was capable, was a failure where she had succeeded. When she talked of these things her voice, that beautiful voice, changed and she spoke in a way I never heard her speak otherwise, neither privately nor on stage. It was as if she had a special register, a tone that she kept for this subject and for this alone. ‘Oh Molly!' I said once, for I was at a loss as to know how to respond to what I was hearing. ‘Don't pity me,' she replied and her tone was sharp. ‘All I want is to be an actor and
to have a home and I've got both of those things. I've got everything I want.'

I rinsed the last plate and put it on the drainer, made myself more coffee in a china mug speckled with polka dots. The big clock at the head of the stairs bonged softly for nine-thirty. I carried the mug out of the kitchen, into the hall and through to the sitting room. It looked this morning like some kind of jewelled casket, like a box of treasures. Sunlight caught on copper and brass, was reflected in polished wood and in mirrors. All this glitter and brightness was offset by the rich dark colours of the kilims on the floor.