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

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. Idoubted 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 foolishway 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 muchAndrew 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