Molly Fox's Birthday (11 page)

I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't feel wholly comfortable with him for the duration of that first visit. I kept him strictly to myself, I didn't introduce him to any of my friends. It disturbed me to see him out of context, and I hadn't expected this at all. I was aware of things I hadn't noticed before, and I found it hard to realise that I didn't really know him as well as I had thought. He struck me as very much the country priest, the farmer's son, and his accent was stronger and more marked than I'd realised until now. Tom, thank goodness, gave absolutely no indication that he knew what was going through my mind. I think he was far too busy enjoying himself.

I settled down in England in the following years, and Tom made at the very least an annual visit to me. As I became more secure in my new life I began to recognise the snobbery there was in my attitude to my brother, and I hated myself for it. The next time he was over I resolved to introduce him to some of my friends and colleagues. Even though I was involved with Ken by that time – it was about a year since we'd all worked together, me and Molly and David and Ken – I excluded him from any possible meeting. At the time I could hardly have said why. It was something I didn't even want to think about and, with hindsight, it had more to do with deep-seated reservations about Ken rather than any problem with Tom. There was always Molly, of course. She was in London at that time, in rehearsal for the role of the daughter in
The Glass
 
Menagerie
, and when I suggested to her that the three of us meet one evening for dinner, she readily accepted.

She arrived late to the restaurant, apologetic and somewhat flustered. I could see at once that something was up. Part of the problem was, I think, her shyness, something I
still found hard to square with the very public nature of her work, although I have since come to accept that the two are not mutually exclusive. She was that evening, at least to begin with, in her closed mode, and came across as mousy, dowdy. Tom, on the other hand, energised by the city, showed forth all his intelligence and good nature. The contrast between them was striking. There was something I noticed about Tom on this visit that I couldn't fathom: he kept reminding me of David McKenzie. The first time it struck me, I actually laughed out loud in surprise.
What is
it?
Tom said.
Nothing. Nothing at all
. How could this be? My brother is stocky, jowly, with something of a paunch, so it wasn't a physical resemblance, that was for sure. It wasn't idiom of speech either, nor any particular mannerism. I watched Tom now as he talked to Molly, as he ordered from the waiter, hoping for a clue.

Molly then told us about a disagreement that she had had that afternoon with her director. ‘He sat us all down and said, “Today I want to look at the mother in this play and I want you all to share with us something of how you feel about your own mother.” Some directors seem to want to turn the whole rehearsal process into a big therapy session. And I realise some actors like that. They want to do a certain kind of research – if they're playing a homeless person they'll go out and spend a night on a park bench. I don't see the point in that, because even while you're lying on the bench you know that you have a nice safe bed at home and that you'll be in it the following night, so you aren't finding out at all what it's like to be homeless. My approach is more direct; I like to just think my way into a role. A lot of it's common sense and using your imagination. Of course you have to dig into
your own emotions, your own feelings and experiences. I think some actors like to share all that with the company; it makes them feel closer to the people with whom they're going to work, whereas I think it should go straight into the work. It's down to me to translate my own experience into the role, and I tried to explain that to the director.' I knew the person in question.

‘So you had an argument?' I said.

‘We most certainly did.'

‘I've often thought there are great similarities between being an actor and being a priest,' Tom remarked unexpectedly, ‘although don't tell my bishop I said that.'

Molly laughed. ‘No, seriously,' he said. ‘There's obviously a certain theatrical side to what I do, in that you have to become at different times the person people need you to be at that particular moment. Which isn't to say that I'm insincere or pretending, any more than the theatre is about pretence. Well, it is at one level, but it isn't at all on another, if you see what I mean.' I did, but I was surprised, for what he said bespoke a deep understanding of acting, much deeper than I would have expected. ‘It's my role in life, quite literally, and I'm seldom out of costume,' and he gestured to his collar. ‘But it's always really me.'

‘Then it's exactly the same as being an actor,' Molly said.

‘Not exactly, but similar, yes. It's a way of translating your whole self.'

With that, the waiter brought our starters, and for a moment I thought that Molly was going to ask him to take them away again. She wanted to go on quizzing Tom, and the food had become an unwelcome distraction to her. Fortunately her line of questioning had caught his
imagination. ‘I suppose what's similar about being an actor and being a priest is a certain perception of time. Eternity is a priest's business. But we all live in time. And what I'm doing is trying to make people aware of how the two coexist. That's what religion is, keeping that sense of eternity while being in time; and trying to live accordingly.
The Kingdom of God is here, now
. That's what that's all about.'

‘And what about the theatre then?'

Tom thought about this. ‘What about the theatre? Well, it exists in time – a play lasts an hour and a half, two hours, but if it's any good at all it takes you somewhere outside time. And then you can see things – see things differently. But then, who am I to say that? You're the actor and you're the playwright. What do I know about the theatre?' He picked up the bread-basket and offered it to me. I had already started eating some moments earlier, but still Molly sat there and didn't lift her cutlery. She was staring at Tom. Sometimes Molly reminds me of a cat. She has that same stillness, that concentrated energy, that steady, unblinking gaze. Suddenly Tom put down his fork again.

‘Last week, I called to visit a family in my parish. They have a lot of difficulties, a lot of social problems. The father drinks heavily and there's a strong sense of domestic violence, although the mother denies it. Social services are on the case and there are small children involved. It's all very sad. The father runs a breaker's yard from right beside the house. The place is surrounded by old broken rusty wrecks of cars; it's as bleak a spot as you can imagine. I parked and went up to the house, where one of the daughters of the family, Eileen, who's about five, was sitting
on the doorstep crying. Her hair is badly cut, with a big square fringe that doesn't flatter her at all; and her face was blotched and red. I don't know when I last saw such a grimy, pitiful little scrap of humanity. I said hello and asked her how she was. She didn't reply and I hunkered down beside her. “Is something wrong? Do you want to tell me?” Still she said nothing, but she sniffed and shook her head. She was holding a Barbie-type doll, and even by Barbie standards it was quite over the top. It had a tiara and transparent wings, blonde hair and a gold dress covered in sequins. “Is that you?” I asked. She looked up at me and she smiled. “That's me,” she said. “I'm really a princess.”

“I could tell that,” I said.

“I'm a princess and sometimes I'm a fairy, and I'm a mermaid too.” I thought she was marvellous. She knew her own worth, she insisted on it. She knew that no matter how miserable the circumstances in which life placed her, she was better than that. She knew that a part of her was special and remarkable, and she was able to articulate that in her own way. “I'm a princess and sometimes I'm a fairy, and I'm a mermaid too.”'

‘What made you mention that, just now?' Molly said.

‘I'm not sure. Eileen, indeed her whole family, have been very much on my mind in the past few days. I wish I could do more to help them, change their circumstances in some way. Forgive me for talking shop, this is foolish of me. I'm distracting you from your dinner,' Tom said to Molly, and he gestured to her to eat. ‘I hope I'm not annoying you, saying foolish things about your profession. It's only speculation on my part. Why don't you tell me what it's like being an actor.'

‘I don't know – it's hard to say.' She was abstracted, and I could see that she had been thinking of something else entirely. ‘There are two schools of thought on acting,' I said to help her out. ‘Some people consider actors to be vain, silly people who only want to show off. And some think they're incredibly brave – not for the way they embrace a life with so much insecurity and rejection hardwired into it, but for the way they put their whole self out there.'

‘There are as many ways of being an actor as there are people who act,' Molly said. ‘That's the beauty of it, that it's so individual. Some are quite restrained and understated, some completely manic.'

‘Surely that depends on the role?'

‘Not in the way I'm thinking. It's always about energy, energy either released and displayed, or held back and controlled; but one way or another it has to be there. If it isn't, you're just seeing bad acting. Some actors, like me, are chameleons, they transform themselves completely. And then there are other actors who are always just themselves. That isn't to say that they're bad at what they do; that they can't act. Some of the finest actors who have ever worked in the theatre are like this. What I mean is that they have a highly developed persona in their everyday life that closely resembles what they present in their work. The public accepts it perhaps without fully understanding it or being aware of it, so deep is the convention. You tend to see it more in the cinema than on stage, and to be honest you don't see it that often. The more protean type, the kind of thing I do, is more usual. Take David now, for example,' she said, turning to me. ‘David McKenzie. He's a classic example. He's a wonderful actor, but he's always himself.'

It startled me that she should so suddenly mention him, when I'd been thinking intently about him in relation to Tom. It was almost as if she could read my mind, and it spooked me.

‘Is he the actor who was in your last play?' Tom asked me, and I nodded.

‘He's working on a film at the moment,' Molly said. ‘He's going to be a huge star, wait and see. He's got everything going for him.'

By this stage she appeared to have relaxed into the situation. She ate her salad and chatted to Tom about the theatre, about the play he and I were to see later that evening. I withdrew somewhat from the conversation and studied my brother. Why had I been so worried about bringing him into my new life? It was more than just a social thing. Many of my friends were openly hostile to the church and with good reason. I fully understood their anger. I would probably have made much more of a distance from it myself had it not been for Tom, by which I don't mean mere family loyalty. Even if he hadn't been my brother he'd have given me pause for thought, had he crossed my path. The very least he could do was make you consider the possibility of the divine in a world where the notion was generally scorned. I had often wondered how someone as mentally sophisticated as Tom endured his life. He was at that time a curate in the small mid-Ulster town where one of our sisters lived with her family. I had met his parish priest, with whom he shared a house: a humourless and unimaginative man who went through the rituals of his vocation, conducting marriages and funerals, saying Mass, as if it were all meaningless and functional. Tom has an exceptionally good mind. All
through my teens it was he who had fed my imagination, been my intellectual mentor and companion. He'd introduced me not only to the theatre, but to Russian literature and Baroque music. He countered the pietistic Catholicism to which I was exposed at home and at school, all medals and miracles, by giving me books by St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila; he told me about Charles de Foucauld and about Liberation theology. And I took it all for granted. I didn't realise that he was setting my mind free, that he was giving me a life. Nor did I realise how much I meant to him. Sitting in that London restaurant I remembered being home for a weekend during my first year at university and suddenly Tom had blurted out to me when there was no one else around: ‘I miss you.' At the time I didn't understand. It was only now I realised how lonely he must have been after I'd gone.

The rest of the meal passed over pleasantly enough, as far as I can recall. Nothing of any great consequence was said, and my memory of it has been somewhat eclipsed by what happened afterwards on the Tube. The three of us set out together although Molly, who was going home, was to get out at the stop before us to change lines. In the train we managed to secure for ourselves seats for four, two and two facing. I sat beside Molly, and Tom was facing us. I think the rolling stock must have been very old, because it was particularly noisy; we could barely hear each other. We had, I thought, by that stage fallen into the platitudes and courtesies with which one wraps up such an evening, when there is little time left for anything real to be said. ‘It was lovely to meet you at last, having heard so much about you,' Molly shouted at Tom. ‘You're fortunate
to have each other, to come from such a happy family. When I think about my own childhood … My mother walked out on my brother and me when I was seven.' So extraordinary was this information to me, so offhand the delivery and so strange the circumstances in which she had chosen to share it, that for a moment I thought I must have surely misheard. I glanced over at Tom, but his face was quite impassive.