Beautiful World, Where Are You(64)

Can you come here for a second? she said. He walked toward her a few steps. Very quietly but with some agitation she said: No, I mean here. Where I’m standing. He paused. Well, why? he said. Instead of answering she merely went on looking at him with a kind of pleading, distressed expression. He came toward her, and she put her hand on his forearm and held it. The cloth of his shirt was damp. She pulled him a little closer, so their bodies were almost touching, and her lips wet, rain streaming down her cheeks and nose. He didn’t pull away from her, in fact he stood very close, and his mouth was almost at her ear. She said nothing and her breath came fast and high. Softly he said: Eileen, I know. I understand. But it can’t be like that, okay? She was trembling and her lips looked pale. I’m sorry, she said. He didn’t pull away, he stood there letting her hold on to his arm. There’s nothing to be sorry for, he said. You haven’t done anything wrong. I understand, okay? There’s nothing to say sorry for. Can we walk on

now, do you think? They walked on, Eileen staring down at her feet. In the clearing behind the gate Lola was waiting, holding her bicycle upright. At the sight of them, she kicked one pedal impatiently with her foot and sent it spinning. Where have you been?

she called out as they approached. You ran ahead, said Eileen. Simon retrieved Eileen’s bike from the grass and handed it over to her before lifting out his own. I hardly ran, said Lola. With a strange look on her face, she reached out and tousled Eileen’s wet hair. You look like a drowned rat, she said. Let’s go. He let them walk on together.

Silently with his eyes on the wheel of his bicycle he prayed: Dear God, let her live a happy life. I’ll do anything, anything, please, please. When she was twenty-one, she went to see him in Paris, where he spent the summer living in an old apartment building with a mechanical lift shaft. They were friends then, writing each other amusing postcards with famous nude paintings on the front. When they walked together along the Champs-élysées, women turned their heads to watch him, he was so tall and beautiful, so austere, and he never looked back at them. The night she arrived in his apartment she told him the story of how she had lost her virginity, only a few weeks before, and while she was talking her face was so hot it felt painful, and the story was so terribly bad and awkward, but somehow perversely she liked telling it to him, she liked the funny unshockable tone he took with her. He even made her laugh. They were lying close together, their shoulders almost touching. That was the first time. To be held in his arms and to feel him move inside her, this man who kept himself apart from everyone, to feel him giving in, taking comfort in her, that was her whole idea of sexuality, it had never surpassed that, still. And for him, to have her in that way, when she was so innocent and nervous, trembling all over, so unconscious it seemed of what she was giving him, he almost felt guilty. But it could never be wrong with her, no matter what

they did together, because she had nothing evil in her, and he would give his life away to make her happy. His life, whatever that was. And the years afterwards, with Natalie in Paris, his youth, gone now, never to be had back again. Living with you is like living with depression, Natalie told him. He wanted, he tried to make her happy, and he couldn’t. Alone afterwards, washing his dishes after dinner, the single plate and fork on the draining board. And not even young anymore, not really. For Eileen those years had passed also somehow, sitting on floorboards unboxing flat-pack furniture, bickering, drinking warm white wine from plastic cups. Watching all her friends move away, move on, to New York, to Paris, while she stayed behind, working in the same little office, having the same four arguments over and over again with the same man. Unable to remember anymore what she had thought her life would be. Hadn’t there been a time when it had meant something to her, to be alive, to be living? But what? One weekend last year, they were both at home, and Simon borrowed his parents’ car to drive her into Galway. She wore a red tweed jacket with a brooch on the lapel, her hair loose around her shoulders, dark, soft, her hands lying in her lap, white like doves. They talked about their families, about her mother, his mother. She was still living with her boyfriend then. Driving back that night, the crescent moon lopsided and golden like a lifted saucer of champagne, the top buttons of her blouse were undone, she put her hand inside, touching her breastbone, they were talking about children, she had never wanted any before, but lately she wondered, and it was impossible for him not to think about it, he felt a hard low ache inside himself, let me do it to you, he wanted to say, I have money, I’ll take care of everything. Jesus Christ. What about you, she asked, do you want kids?

Very much, he said. Yeah. That dead noise when she closed the car door behind her.

Thinking of it again that night, imagining that she would let him, that she would want

him to, and afterwards feeling empty, and ashamed of himself. He saw her on O’Connell Street a few weeks later, it was August, she was walking with a friend he didn’t know, all the way across the road, heading toward the river, and she was wearing a white dress, it was a hot day. How graceful she looked in the crowd, his eyes followed her, her long beautiful neck, her shoulders gleaming in the sunlight. Like watching his life walk away from him. One evening in Dublin around Christmas, she saw him from the window of a bus, he was crossing the street, on his way home from work probably, wearing his long winter overcoat, tall and golden-headed under the streetlights, God it was an awful time, Alice in hospital, and Aidan saying he needed to think about things, and there, out the window of the bus, there was Simon, crossing the street. It was so peaceful just to watch him, his fine handsome figure, making his way through the deep blue liquid darkness of December, his quiet solitude, his self-containment, and she felt so happy, so grateful that they lived in the same city, where she could see him even without meaning to, where he could appear like this in front of her just when she needed most to see him, someone who had loved her for her entire life. All of that. And their phone calls, the messages they wrote to one another, their jealousies, the years of looks, suppressed smiles, their dictionary of little touches. All the stories they had told about each other, about themselves. This much was in their eyes and passed between them.