Molly Fox's Birthday (23 page)

‘But you know who I mean?'

‘I do, of course.'

‘You know he was murdered?' His face as he said this was strange, half grieved and half excited, and I didn't like the excitement.

‘Yes,' I said shortly.

‘You must remember the time when it happened, because you were at college with my dad.'

‘You should ask Andrew about all of this, not me.'

‘I don't want to upset him. If he felt all right about talking to me about it then he'd bring up the subject himself, wouldn't he? But he never does. It's important for me because it's my family too, you see.' I thought about this for a minute and then I said, ‘I'll tell you what I know, Tony, but it isn't much.'

I described to him in some detail that Saturday evening so many years ago when I'd met Andrew on the street and gone with him to his house. I told him how cold it had been, how the sky had been deep pink as the sun set and how all this had happened just before his uncle was killed. I knew that what I was telling him was important,
even though it was indirect, allusive, because it would help to put the bald fact of Billy's death into an imaginative context for him.

‘Don't tell my dad,' he said again, ‘but I went to the newspaper library and looked up that date. There wasn't much in the English papers but I was able to get to see some of the Irish papers on microfilm, and there was more there. It was so weird, seeing his name and thinking, “That's my dad's brother. That's my uncle.”'

‘All of this must seem quite unreal to you.'

‘It doesn't. That's the problem. It seems completely real but I can't get at it, somehow.'

‘They weren't particularly close, Andrew and Billy. They didn't get on.'

‘I know that. I imagine that must have made it even more difficult for Dad.'

‘Sometimes family things aren't easy.' He looked at me straight-faced, this child of divorced parents, this veteran of family life, and politely agreed with me. Andrew would have done anything for Tony. He lived in comfort, was sent to the best of schools; both his welfare and his pleasures were carefully considered and lavishly provided for. The one thing Andrew couldn't do for his son was to protect him from what he himself was, from the strange evolution and deep grief of his own life. Sometimes the most important and powerful element is an absence, a lack, a burnished space in your mind that glows and aches as you try to fill it.

‘How much have you talked to your dad about this?'

‘Hardly at all. I've always known about it. I mean, I sort of grew up knowing that my dad had had a brother, and I knew what had happened to him, but I didn't
really think about it much. You don't understand these things when you're a little kid. Just recently I've been trying to get my head round it, but like I said, I don't want to upset him. Promise me you won't tell him we talked about this.'

‘I'll do no such thing. I'll tell him he needs to tell you everything he knows about Billy.'

‘No, please, promise.' There was the sound of Andrew's key in the door, and Tony stared at me in alarm. ‘
Please
.' I relented, and against my better judgement hissed ‘Promise' as Andrew came into the room. He was completely preoccupied with being so late and didn't notice the atmosphere between Tony and me.

Because both our lives were so busy, although I had seen Andrew a few times since that day when I talked to Tony, this drink in Molly's garden, on her birthday, was the first private and considered meeting we had had since then. ‘The next time you see Tony,' I said, ‘tell him about Paris.'

‘But I lied.'

‘Explain why. He was a child. He'll understand now. He's not a child any more. You should talk to him about Billy, too. Show him the ring. Tell him the whole story behind it, just as you've told it to me. Tony has a right to know about these things. They're a part of his life too, his identity. He needs to know.'

‘A couple of months ago he said he wanted to go to Belfast.'

‘Did you take him there?'

‘I ignored it. I thought he was pulling my leg. You know, I thought I was getting to the bottom of things, but it seems I'm still evading them. Billy was the whole idea behind the memorials series. All the time I was working
on the project about portraits and then the landscapes, at the back of my mind there was always the thought of how people are memorialised, and all of that came from Billy. And yet when we made the series and I wrote the book, his was the one death that I couldn't bring myself to address. You see,' he said to me, ‘there's something I don't think you're really considering here, and I very much doubt if Tony's aware of it either. Billy was killed. But it's also highly likely that he himself killed people too. He was deeply involved in Loyalist paramilitary activity, there's not the slightest doubt about that. Coming to terms with the idea that he was murdered was one thing. That he killed people, innocent people, is something else entirely. I still don't know how I'd explain that to Tony, how I'd help him cope with it. And that's why I avoid talking to him about his uncle.'

‘It's great that the book is dedicated to him,' I said, and he laughed.

‘I suppose so. What kind of expiation is that? The best I could manage, but it would have been meaningless to the Billy I remember. Maybe I did it for myself. That's one thing the making of this series convinced me about – that memorials of any kind have more to do with the living than with the dead.'

The heat had gone from the day, but warmer tones had come into the light, deep golden, as the evening wore on. Everything in the garden, the trees, the table, the fake cow, threw bizarrely long, distorted shadows. Near where we sat there was a honeysuckle, all frail cream and yellow spikes, all heaped and clustered against the wooden lattice. Its fragrance sweetened and intensified as the day ended into a deep rich perfume; and there were
roses too in Molly's garden, roses and stock. When I was growing up in the country there was woodbine in the hedges, honeysuckle's wild little cousin, its stubby spikes yellow and pink, its perfume even stronger than honeysuckle. These things never leave you. I remembered that night more than twenty years ago just before Andrew went away, when we sat drinking cheap wine in the rough garden of a rented house.

‘One other thing about that night in Paris,' he went on. ‘At one stage in the evening I turned on the television and I saw news coverage of what had happened. It made me aware of exactly what I had been caught up in, how near a miss I had had. It frightened and upset me; I turned it off almost at once. Months later, when I was back in England, I happened to be watching television and suddenly there again was footage of that evening in Paris, the helicopters, people distressed and crying, the buildings of the city and the sky exactly as they had been. But the film was being used as part of a broader documentary about terrorism and there was a soundtrack over it, a voice-over and music. The music changed everything. It was a kind of soft jazz; for me it trivialised the images, and I was incensed. I did something I'd never done before; I rang the duty office of the channel that was broadcasting it. I spoke to a bored woman there. “What exactly is your problem, sir? That we're showing a news documentary and using music over it? That's actually quite common in the media now.” I told her not to be sarcastic. When she heard that I had been there on the day, that I'd been caught up in it, she thought that was my beef, which it wasn't, not really. I hung up in the end, I could get no change out of her, and I sat there alone on the sofa, so
angry. And then I thought, “This
is
just because I was involved on the day.” The woman was right, I had seen any number of broadcasts like this in the past and they hadn't bothered me in the same way. All of this happened before I worked in television myself and I suppose, with hindsight, it was a good thing. It made me aware of the sensitivities of trying to present other people's realities in a way that I wouldn't otherwise have understood. After all I've said,' he went on, ‘you may find this hard to believe, but I don't often think about that night in Paris. The knowledge that came out of it is with me every day, but the event itself has become distant and strange. I don't like thinking about it, and I'll probably never mention it to you again.

‘But there is something I want to ask, if I may, something about you that has always puzzled me. I've always envied you your relationship to your family,' he said, ‘your closeness to them and the support they give you. And yet I have to confess I don't think I've ever understood it.'

I knew exactly what he meant. Yes, I was close to my family. I went back to visit them whenever I could, and when they were able, some of them came to visit me. We spoke to each other frequently on the phone. I knew all their news, both serious and trivial things: the results of hospital tests, the results of minor football matches. Unlike many in my circle I think I have always understood the value of formulaic conversation and how it can make for real communication. Such exchanges can forge a link with someone when there is deep affection but no real common ground. Andrew, with his impatient intelligence, would never understand this. But I know Molly
would agree with me. Her relationship with Fergus is built upon a similar visceral warmth, the childhood bond that has never been broken. Closeness of that particular type is perhaps only possible with people one has known all one's life, when the bonds have been made before something in one's soul has been closed down by consciousness, by knowledge; a kind of closeness that can coexist even with dislike. Perhaps this was something that Andrew could understand, perhaps this was why he was haunted by the thought of Billy, but I wasn't sure that I could explain it to him.

Instead I said, ‘I remember when I was a teenager, one of my sisters was already married. She was in her early twenties and she was expecting her first baby. We were at home together alone and she was talking about it, how excited she was, how much she was looking forward to it; and then she said, “When this child is born, my life won't count for anything any more. Everything will be for him. The only meaning my life will have will be in relation to the baby.” Don't get me wrong, this wasn't a complaint, for she said it with delight. Her attitude was shocking to me for it was as if life was some sort of terrible problem, a burden, and she had discovered a way to evade it, to pass it on to someone else and to let them suffer it. And even then, even though I was hardly more than a child myself, I knew that that wasn't right. I remember that you were arguing with Molly one time about religion and you said that one's first and perhaps only moral responsibility was to be fully human. If you did that, you said, everything else followed on. If you ask me, I suppose I'd say that the only thing you have to do with your life is to live it. And my sister's attitude appalled me because it was a
repudiation of that, and yet she felt fully justified and vindicated in doing it.

‘She had a son about a week later, whom I love dearly, as I love all my nieces and nephews. But I think you can see what I'm getting at. Close as I am, I feel that I don't belong. When I look at my family, their lives seem to me like a dream, a beautiful dream, full of warmth and companionship, but a dream for all that. While this was happening all around me, while I was growing up in it, Tom was simultaneously giving me books, making me question things, making me think. Tom in himself had been a challenge, drifting in and out of the house from time to time, the respect the rest of my family felt for his calling keeping him at a distance from them, although they would have denied this. I know he felt it, for he told me so. I think Tom and I saved each other from the worst of the loneliness that comes from being part of a family where you don't fit in. He helped me to find a life of my own that was right for me, a life that was a balance between his rather austere consciousness and their unthinking warmth.'

‘You're very fortunate.'

‘I suppose I am. Have you ever spoken to Molly about this? She has a theory that everyone gets pretty well what they want in life because they make a point of doing so, but the problem is that a great many people either don't know what it is that they want or they won't admit it.'

‘Yes,' Andrew said, ‘Molly did talk to me about this. It's something that's very important to her, the idea of owning your own life, standing over the choices you've made and honouring them, owning your mistakes as well as your successes.'

A change had come over his face at the mention of Molly's name, and it was a look I recognised. The three of us had met up in a London hotel on a dark afternoon the previous December when snow was forecast. Andrew and I arrived first and we ordered hot chocolate against the bitter cold of the day. We sat in an alcove near a big window, which afforded little light. The room was small and dim, low-lit by wall sconces, and there was a candle burning on the table. It was all chintz and gilt; and as the chocolate was served a gentle snow began to fall. I have never got over my childish delight in snow, and at its first falling I cannot help a feeling of excitement I know to be absurd. And then Molly arrived. She was dressed in brown, a colour that suits her well. She wore a brown wool coat with a velvet collar and a small felt hat that would have defeated a lesser woman, would have made her dowdy, but Molly did honour to it even as she pulled it off and tossed it aside.
Snow! Chocolate!
We called for an extra cup, and she started eating the almond biscuits that had been brought to us. She was like nothing so much as a bird that day, a wren, all restless energy. What did we talk about? I have no idea. I only know that Andrew and Molly did most of the talking. I fell silent. I watched my friends, and I saw for the first time Andrew look at Molly in that particular way, that softness that he manifested today even when he was only thinking about her. How to describe it? Adoration, I suppose. Yes, adoration.