Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden Read Free Book Online

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