Beautiful World, Where Are You(42)

programme was ending then, the production credits rolling. Still with her eyes on the screen she went on lightly: Look, I know you don’t want to talk about it. But what you said earlier, about feeling lonely. I feel like that all the time. I’m only saying that because I want you to know you’re really not alone in that feeling. In case you think you are. And just from my perspective, whenever I get really lonely, you’re the person I call. Because you have a soothing effect on me. You know, the things I would normally worry about, they don’t really seem that worrying when I talk to you. Anyway, what I’m saying is, if you ever want to call me when you feel that way, you can. You don’t even have to say why you’re calling, we can just talk about other things. I’ll complain to you about my family, probably. Or I can come over here and we can do this. Okay? Not that you have to call me, obviously, but you can. Any time. That’s all. He did not take his eyes from her while she was speaking, and when she had finished he was quiet for a moment. Then in a mild, friendly tone of voice he said: Eileen, you know on the phone the other night, you were saying I should find a wife for myself? Laughing, she turned to face him. Yes, she said. He was smiling, looking happy and tired. You meant like, some new person who was going to come into my life and marry me, he said. Someone I’ve never met before. Eileen interjected to add: And very beautiful. A younger woman, I think we said. Not too intelligent, but sweet-tempered. He was nodding his head.

Right, he said. She sounds fantastic. Now, I have a question. When I get this wife, whom I can presume from the thrust of your remarks is not the same person as you—

With mock indignation Eileen interrupted: Certainly she’s not me. For one thing, I’m a lot better-read than she is. He went on smiling to himself. Sure, he said. But once I find her, whoever she might be, will you and I still be friends? She sat back against the sofa cushions then, as if to consider the question. After a pause, she replied: No. I think

when you find her, you’ll have to give me up. It might even be that giving me up is the precondition for finding her in the first place.

As I suspected, he said. I’ll never find her, then.

Eileen lifted her hands up in astonishment. Simon, she said. Be serious. This woman is your soulmate. God put her on earth for you.

If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn’t have made me who I am.

For a moment they looked at one another. She put her hand to her cheek then, and her face was flushed. So you’re not going to renounce our friendship, she said.

Not for anything.

She reached her hand out and touched it to his. I wouldn’t renounce it either, she said.

And you can believe me, because none of my boyfriends have ever liked you, and it never made any difference to me.

He was laughing then, they both were. At midnight she went to brush her teeth and he turned the lights off in the kitchen. Emerging from the bathroom she said: See, I obviously had an ulterior motive, because I brought my toothbrush. She followed him into his room and he shut the door behind them, saying something inaudible. She laughed, and through the door her laughter was softened and musical. In the darkness the main room of the apartment lay quiet again and still. Two empty bowls had been left in the sink, two spoons, an empty water glass with a faint print of clear lip balm on the rim. Through the door the sound of conversation murmured on, the words rounded out, indistinct, and by one in the morning silence had fallen. At half past five the sky began

to lighten in the east-facing living room window, from black to blue and then to silvery white. Another day. The call of a crow from an overhead power line. The sound of buses in the street.





16


Alice, do you remember a few weeks or months ago I sent you an email about the Late Bronze Age collapse? I went on reading about it afterwards, and it seems that while little is known about the period, scholarly interpretations are more various than the Wikipedia page led me to believe. We do know that before the collapse, rich and literate palace economies in the Eastern Mediterranean traded in exorbitantly costly goods, apparently sending and receiving them as gifts to and from the rulers of other kingdoms.

And we also know that afterwards, palaces were destroyed or abandoned, written languages were lost, and luxury goods were no longer produced in the same quantities or traded across the same distances. But how many people, how many inhabitants of this ‘civilisation’, actually lived in the palaces? How many wore the jewellery, drank from the bronze cups, ate the pomegranates? For every one member of the elite, thousands more were illiterate and impoverished subsistence farmers. After the

‘collapse of civilisation’, many of them moved elsewhere, and some may have died, but for the most part their lives probably did not change much. They went on growing crops. Sometimes the harvest was good and sometimes it wasn’t. And in another corner of the continent, those people were your ancestors and mine – not the palace-dwellers, but the peasants. Our rich and complex international networks of production and distribution have come to an end before, but here we are, you and I, and here is humanity. What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal – the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms?

What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always – just to live and be with other people?