Molly Fox's Birthday (14 page)

‘I can't tell you how much it means to me to see you here today,' he said. I did then manage a few words of sympathy. I told him I was glad that, from what the minister said, Andrew and his father had drawn closer towards the end. ‘Did we?' he said. ‘I don't know. We spent a lot of time together, as much as I could manage, but did we get close to each other? I don't know. Close: what does that even mean? Maybe that's the answer. It's not just my father's passing. It's like the death of a whole family now, with both parents gone as well as Billy.'

‘You're still here,' I said stupidly.

‘Not for long. I'll still have to come back and forth for a while to wrap things up: sell the house, close a couple of bank accounts, that kind of thing. In all honesty, there isn't a great deal to see to. And after that, my most ardent wish is never to come back to Belfast, ever, ever again.'

The undertakers were still preparing the hearse for departure. I asked Andrew about the burial and he said to me, ‘Don't even think about attending it. You've already done more than enough by being here today. Are you going back to London tonight? Let me walk you to your car. Where are you parked?'

As we crossed the short distance around the side of the
church towards the hire car he said, ‘Did you have a word with Nicole?'

‘I'm afraid not.'

‘I wouldn't worry about it. She's barely speaking to me these days. I was surprised she agreed to come over to the funeral. I don't think we're going to make it.' And then because he could see the look of bewilderment on my face he added, ‘I know, I can hardly believe it myself.'

‘But Tony –' I began, and he winced.

‘I know, I know. That's for another day. I just wanted you to know what the situation was.' It felt like another death. Looking at Andrew I could see how hard it went with him. We didn't speak again until we reached the car, and then I told him to ring me when he was back in London and had settled. We would meet for a drink, or have lunch together. He thanked me once more for coming to the funeral and we said goodbye. He put his arms around me and embraced me again, but this time without the sudden, rib-crushing intensity. It was a strange embrace, caught somewhere between friendship and sensuality, for he kissed me on the cheek, but slowly, tenderly. He held me in his arms for a few moments and stroked my hair before kissing me once more. And then, rather awkwardly, he let me go.

I had left the city far behind me and was well on the way to the airport when I pulled over to the side of the road and took out my phone. I extended the car hire by an extra day and postponed the flight until late the following evening. It was only after I'd made these arrangements that I began to think about what I might do with this extra time. I only knew that it was too soon for me to go back to London: I wasn't ready to do that. I needed
time to assimilate everything that the morning had brought forth. Above all, I could see now the great failure of imagination there had been on my part in not understanding what Billy's death had meant. I hadn't realised that such a tragedy wasn't fixed in the past, but was an active, malignant thing, that changed and mutated over the years; and it never went away. I had taken at face value Andrew's silence over the years, and in this I had been foolish. The minister was right, there was something biblical in the family's loss.
A certain man had two sons
. The lost son, murdered; and then the living son with whom he would never be reconciled, not in this life: and Andrew believed in no other.

I suppose it goes without saying that I headed for home. That is, I drove over to where my family lived. I went by the most circuitous route and I took my time. I thought about Andrew the whole way there. It seemed an irony that I had rarely seen the north looking lovelier than it was today. The light deepened and intensified – a rich gold that lit up the landscape, the fading trees and the hedges with their bright berries; the drenched, flooded fields. To me it was a tragic place; to Andrew it had always been simply wretched. Perhaps he was right after all, I thought now, and in taking the view I did I was according it a sad poetry that it not only didn't merit, but that was a real perversion, romanticising all that had happened there. ‘Dark feelings can become a habit,' he'd said to me once when we were talking – arguing – about this. ‘And if they're strong enough, like many strong feelings they can even be enjoyable.' He said that this was why the peace process wasn't working, that the whole population was locked in a trance of grief that they didn't break out
of because it defined them, it made them feel real. And in talking about all this he never once mentioned Billy.

I crested the brow of a hill, and there below me were the mountains of mid-Ulster, low and ancient, with their soft skyline. Blue-grey, green, on and on they went across the whole of the wide horizon, but gentle, for all that. There was a quietude about them that I loved to see, and that made them dearer to me than other, more spectacular mountain ranges. The sun was setting on them now as the short day ended. To me these mountains said one thing above all: home. At this precise moment, this was where I needed to be. I pulled the car over again and sat staring at the landscape before me. Where was I to stay tonight? I thought of my married sisters, my brothers' families. I knew that even showing up unannounced I would be welcome; the inconvenience would mean nothing to them. But I wouldn't be able to bear it today, the babies, the dinners cooking, the television blaring in the background, the cloying happiness of it all and of which I would never fully be a part. I would go to Tom's house instead. If he wasn't there or couldn't accommodate me it didn't matter; I would find a hotel or a guest house. It was enough that I had been here today. I needed that.

Tom was a parish priest now. His church was surrounded by a small graveyard, and beyond that was the parochial house, where he lived alone. It was deep in the countryside, about half a mile from the nearest house and three miles from the nearest village. It dated from a time long before the falling off in vocations to the priesthood, and at one time a curate and a housekeeper would have lived there, as well as the parish priest. Now there was only Tom. The house was grey and forbidding, a stern
square block; and only a few rather lovely lime trees surrounding the church softened the impact of all that stone; of the granite crosses in the graveyard.

Tom was astonished when he opened the door and found me standing on the step; worried too, for he thought something must be wrong. I quickly reassured him and explained the situation. He told me there would be no problem with my staying the night, that he would be glad to have some unexpected time with me. ‘I have to say Mass at seven o'clock this evening, but other than that I have no commitments. There's always the possibility I'll be called out, but I had to go to an accident at four this morning, so I'm hoping not to be disturbed tonight.' We were in the kitchen by now and Tom was making tea. We moved from there up to the sitting room, where a fire was lit in the grate. It reassured me, this room, after the austerity of the outside of the house. It was warm and full of books. On the floor beside the stereo there was a scattering of CDs that Tom hadn't bothered to put back in their cases. This untidiness compensated for the slightly institutional air the room, indeed the whole house, had, that was afforded by the presence of a few religious pictures and statues and by something else that I could never quite define.

‘This funeral you were at in Belfast,' he said, ‘whose was it?' He knew who I meant when I mentioned Andrew, for I had spoken of him from time to time over the years. I explained the situation in some detail and told him about Billy too, about Tony and Nicole. Tom listened. ‘Is Andrew religious at all?' he asked when I'd finished.

‘He isn't, no.'

‘That's a pity.'

‘He wouldn't see it that way. He's against the very idea of religion, to be honest with you.'

‘Do you ever talk to him about it?' I hadn't for years, not since I was a student, for I was no longer sure enough of what I myself believed. I didn't want to expose my last poor, weak vestiges of faith to the brisk rationality of Andrew's atheism, but I wasn't going to tell Tom that.

‘No, I don't,' I said, ‘but himself and Molly row about it from time to time. It can get quite heated, vehement, you know.' Tom laughed.

‘I bet it can. What sort of thing does Molly say?'

‘Oh, I can't remember now.'

‘How's she keeping these days?'

‘You tell me,' I was tempted to reply, for this was at a time when I still faintly resented their friendship. I had begun to realise that Molly had a much stronger personality than I did, for all her shyness and (at times) mousy demeanour. She had a habit of taking over my friends, my family, now, even, as a cat will quietly move into the warm, empty chair one has vacated, and refuse to give it up again.

‘Molly's fine,' I said. ‘Busy as always.'

‘She said an interesting thing to me a while back,' Tom remarked. ‘We were talking about her work and she said that there's a kind of truth that can only be expressed through artifice. She said that what she wanted to convey to people through her work, more than anything else, was reality. It was a question of showing something familiar but in a moment outside time; saying, “Here's love, here's sorrow. Do you recognise them?” I thought it was a good way of putting it.'

More than Tom, I appreciated the accuracy of what
Molly had said, because unlike him I had worked in the theatre. I knew the force of the experience one might have as a member of an audience; but I also knew intimately the strange tawdriness of the things that made it happen: the dressing rooms with their stale air and harshly lit mirrors; those blank corridors and stairways backstage; the faint smell of dust and sweat from old costumes. At no time does a play look more unconvincing than when viewed from the wings, but Molly had laughed when I said this to her. ‘It looks even more peculiar when you're on stage in the middle of it, believe me.'

‘Do the family know you're here?' he said suddenly.

‘No.' He let a silence sit between us for me to fill. ‘I couldn't face it, Tom, and I don't know why.'

‘You can get too much of a good thing,' he said, after another long pause. ‘I won't let on that you've been here.'

‘I feel guilty about it.'

‘There's no reason. Conventional life always expects you to meet it more than halfway. You should give yourself the benefit of the doubt from time to time.' There was another long silence which he finally broke himself, by adding, ‘I certainly do.'

Later in the evening, when the time had come for him to go over to the church, he suggested that I stay at home. It was a Wednesday-night Mass in November; it would be simple and quite short, with no music or sermon. He wouldn't be gone for long. ‘Read the paper, why don't you, or watch television.' But as soon as I was on my own the atmosphere of the house began to unsettle me. I was too conscious of the many dark, empty rooms. The silence was so complete that the coals settling in the grate startled me; and when I put on music I wondered what
strange sounds it might be drowning out. At ten to seven I banked up the fire, put on my coat and let myself out into the night.

All the lights from within the church pressed against the coloured windows, so that the building itself looked like a reliquary or some kind of remarkable shrine. The stained glass glowed; its pictures of saints and angels were vibrant and fragile. Once inside, this effect was lost. The church was nothing like as interesting architecturally as the one in Belfast where the funeral had taken place that morning. It was like a great many other churches I had known during my life. There were the usual banks of little candles before plaster statues. The altar was decorated with some tough, long-lasting white flowers, carnations and chrysanthemums. The windows now looked black, with only the faintest of images visible if one studied them with particular attention. A small congregation had assembled. As I waited for the Mass to start, some of Molly's arguments in favour of belief came back to me.

It wasn't so much a question of believing in a certain thing as not being able to believe in certain other things, and so finding faith by default. She said that much as she valued it, she could never believe in society as a final truth, and the arbitrator of morality. What convinced her in the gospels was the constant denial of the world, that is, of worldliness; she liked the strange, unfathomable and elliptical remarks Christ made. She believed in a consciousness that encompassed everything; compassionate, forgiving. When she argued with Andrew, I noticed something strange: that what he understood as religion and rejected was far more orthodox and narrow than what she believed in, so that they were always talking at cross
purposes. He was more concerned with the lack of material proof than she was. You could pray for a miracle, he said, but it would never happen. The blind stayed blind, the lame, lame. And why, Molly answered, would one be so foolish as to pray for a miracle? It got to the stage when she wouldn't talk to him about it at all; when religion came up she immediately changed the subject.

The door of the sacristy opened and Tom came out. He rang a small golden bell that was suspended from the wall, and crossed to the altar. The congregation stood up and the Mass began.

I remembered all the responses, knew when to stand, to sit and to kneel, in spite of not having been to Mass for longer than I could remember. I didn't – and don't – equate art with religion, but what struck me that evening was the theatrical nature of what I was seeing. At times, it was all I could do to stop myself from applauding. There was that same contrast between the energy and significance of what was taking place and the shabby props that went towards it – those cheap flowers, the banality of the stylised lamb embroidered on the vestments Tom was wearing.

I was torn in my attitude to Catholicism and most of the time, I suppose, I tried not to think about it. Tonight, that wasn't an option. I would never be able to turn my back on it completely, nor would I ever be able to feel wholeheartedly at ease within it. Perhaps that didn't matter. Perhaps Molly was right and, like Andrew, I was taking too narrow and orthodox a definition of religion and then feeling bothered because I couldn't come to terms with it. Tom crossed to the lectern. The second reading was from the Book of Revelation.
Would that you were cold or hot! So,
because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will
spew you out of my mouth
. Well, I thought, that's me told. He prayed for someone in the parish who had been killed in an accident early that morning, and for her family. Stripped to its essentials, without hymns or a sermon, the Mass had an austere beauty that I hadn't expected. Tom let short periods of silence fall from time to time. Someone rang another little bell. We knelt and he performed the rite of consecration. When everyone else went up to Communion, I didn't join them.

When the final prayers had been said, I remained in my pew until the congregation had departed, until Tom opened the sacristy doors and beckoned to me. He switched off the last lights in the church as I approached him, and was putting on his coat as I entered the sacristy, with its strange clutter of ecclesiastical bric-a-brac, censers and candlesticks and incense boats. ‘Isn't this a tremendously cheerless place?' he remarked to me moments later, as he locked the main door of the church. ‘I'll never forget the first day I saw it; that big gloomy house, so isolated. I thought, “How am I going to live here?”' We turned to pick our way through the darkness of the graveyard. ‘There was a housekeeper some years back and she swore the place was haunted, which is rubbish of course, but I can see where she got the idea.'

Back in the sitting room, we stoked the fire again and coaxed it into brilliant flames. ‘What's it like as a parish?' I asked.

‘Oh, it's very difficult. The priest who was here before me, he was an arrogant man. I hate to have to say that, but he created a lot of bad feeling and hostility towards the Church, and those wounds are still there.'

‘That woman you prayed for,' I said, ‘the woman who died: is that the road accident you were called to this morning?' He nodded.

‘She wasn't a woman. She was only a young girl; she was seventeen. She died in hospital a couple of hours later. You don't want to know about it.'

‘Were you at the scene of the accident or at the hospital?'

‘Both. You
really
don't want to know about it.' Tom was the most squeamish person I knew. He covered his face if even the mildest of medical scenes came on television. It was something of a standing joke in our family.
Open-heart surgery on
BBC 2 tonight. Set the video,
Tom
.

‘How do you do it?' I asked. He knew what I meant.

‘No choice. Comes with the territory. Girl's parents had no choice either. They're the ones to feel sorry for, not me.' There was a long pause, and then he literally shuddered at the memory. ‘Let's talk about something else.'

But we didn't talk at all. He lay back in his chair and closed his eyes. Within a few moments, I realised that he'd fallen asleep, and I sat very still so as not to wake him. ‘And how are you?' he'd asked me earlier that day. I'd known it wasn't a casual question, a mere politeness. Sometimes I wished I could have him simply as a brother, without the priestly thing, but that was a vain hope. When I tried to follow the wish by imagining that brother, I drew a blank, so integral was his calling to his identity. He didn't pry into my life, he wasn't judgemental, but he ministered constantly, to me, to Molly, to anyone who crossed his path. Even when I'd spoken to him of Andrew and his family I could see his deep engagement,
that concern that was both profound and detached. Emotion was of less concern to him than was usual with most people. He'd asked how I was, not how I was feeling. ‘Never mind me, Tom. How are
you
?'

The prevailing orthodoxy denigrated what he was, saw it at best as irrelevant, at worst as inherently corrupt. It was the strangest life you could imagine. There was, to begin with, so much bureaucracy and administration, the number-crunching practicality of running a parish that he admitted to finding deeply enervating. There was much that was merely social. His priestly duties were considerable, Masses, funerals, christenings and the like. Ten pounds, my mother told me he'd been offered recently to officiate at a wedding.
And when you think of what they
spend on flowers, on photographs
… But no matter what the world thought of him nor how shabbily it treated him, Tom stayed faithful to the impulse that had led him into this calling in the first place. That he was able to do this was what made his life strange: the interaction between so much quotidian reality and his pure heart. 

As I was sitting at the café terrace, drinking my mineral water and thinking about all this, a bus pulled up on the other side of the road. On its side, between the upper and lower deck, was a long narrow poster advertising a new movie. Against the title and a background of flames were the faces of an impossibly beautiful woman in profile, and a man who was staring straight out of the poster, with a hunted look that only enhanced his glamour. David McKenzie. There was no great surprise in seeing him like this. In the years since I had first met him, I had become accustomed to the sight of David's face on bus shelters,

on vast hoardings, on the front of glossy magazines. The green eyes had become iconic. It was now something of a cliché to photograph him with much of his face masked or obscured – one vivid eye was enough to convey his image, his whole self, so recognisable had he become, so famous. I think I would have been surprised, rather, had he failed to become a celebrity, given the nature of his gift, his personality and his looks. This last, whilst important, was not the most important factor. It was the way everything came together; the way the camera and the screen loved him, as they disdained Molly, the finer actor.

One evening, only a couple of years ago, Molly and I had been in a cinema together, waiting for a film to begin, when a trailer came on for the latest David McKenzie vehicle. Pretty well all his films are action movies with a bit of love interest, and this new one fitted the pattern. There were shots of David abseiling down the side of a building; of a car exploding; of David running; of him holding a sleek silver pistol that looked like a fashion accessory rather than a weapon; of a darkly beautiful woman in a tight red dress who was also holding a gun and who whispered in a generic foreign accent, ‘Don't think I wouldn't kill you.' David's improbable reaction to this was to kiss her passionately. All of these images were speedily intercut with captions –
A mystery he must solve.
A love he cannot escape. A past he cannot leave behind
– with the names of the actors and the title of the film, all read aloud in doomy tones by someone who sounded as if he was speaking from the bottom of a deep trench. I regarded this kind of tosh with humour and affection when David was involved. I turned to Molly and said, ‘I might just go along and see this one, for David. For old
times' sake.' She didn't respond. She was still staring at the screen, where he had just jumped straight through a plate-glass window in slow motion, and then she said, ‘If he'd asked me, I'd have married him.' I thought about this for a minute. ‘But he is married,' I said stupidly. ‘He was always married.' She turned and looked at me. ‘Of course he is,' she said, with a note of annoyance in her voice. ‘But you know what I mean.'

Did I? The trailers were over and the advertisements were beginning now, heralded by the image of a star-shaped branding iron being pulled out of smouldering coals and seemingly thrust towards the screen. This was typical of Molly: the earth-shattering piece of information turned into a throwaway remark and delivered at the wrong time, in an incongruous place.
My brother is in a
mental hospital. If I never had to see my mother again, it
would suit me fine. If he'd asked me, I'd have married
him
. Molly was looking intently at the screen, as if these advertisements mattered to her, as if she might actually want to buy a Coke or a Land Cruiser, as if she was seriously considering joining the army. The branding iron appeared again, the lights went down fully, and the film began.