I Am No One by Patrick Flanery

Author:Patrick Flanery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2016-01-06T12:41:01+00:00

When she came to interview at Oxford, Fadia was in her final year of high school or secondary school, in fact I should have no trouble remembering, it was a lycée, because she was at school in Paris and for some reason it had been decided that Oxford would be a better place for her than one of the French universities. Although she spoke with a distinctive French accent, her English was flawless, and she was, from first sight, one of the most striking young women I have ever met. She had thick dark hair worn long, sometimes up in a chignon, other times falling to her waist, held back with that implement that in England they call an ‘Alice band’ after the Tenniel illustration of Lewis Carroll’s heroine, as if all girls who wear such bands are somehow participants in a vast apparatus of Alice-dom, as if even the men who dare to wear Alice bands—and there were quite a few in my early days in England, a footballer having made such gender transgressions possible—were themselves participating in the emulation of that precocious blonde child.

Fadia was tall and slender and gave the impression of being constructed of pure self-assurance, a confidence so bold it blinded her to her own failures and made her irritable with others whose qualities she regarded as shortcomings, even when she found them in figures of authority like teachers or, indeed, university professors interviewing her for a place in their College. If she believed she was right, I could see in that first meeting, it would take very inventive persuasion to make her see she might be wrong, and this fact was, without my realizing it at the time, one of the most attractive aspects of her character. She was not conventionally beautiful, either, for she had a prominent nose with a slight arch, rather closely set dark eyes, and while her height and slenderness suggested a contortionist more than a great beauty, she held herself as if she were nobility dressed in a pants suit, which, on a less confident girl, would have looked like a loan from a corporate mother’s wardrobe. On Fadia it was as natural as her skin, fine and smooth with the red-gold sheen of amber.

In our first meeting at that admissions interview her insights were workmanlike and she was bullish rather than receptive. She seemed too confident, almost arrogant, to be a natural choice for a College like ours—I would have sent her off to St. Hilda’s, or even Christ Church—and yet I remembered Stephen Jahn’s request, and so asked encouraging questions that I hoped would lead Fadia towards answers which would make it easier for me to persuade Bethan we should give her the kind of score—we scored all the candidates and then compared notes with the other interviewing team at the end of two days—that would make her, if not one of the top candidates, someone solidly in the middle of the pack, about whom there could be no doubts.

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