Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

  I suppose the point I’m making is that there’s no end of fun to be had once you get into the Christian mindset. For you and me it’s harder, because we can’t seem to shake the conviction that nothing matters, life is random, our sincerest feelings are reducible to chemical reactions, and no objective moral law structures the universe. It’s possible to live with those convictions, of course, but not really possible, I don’t think, to believe the things that you and I say we believe. That some experiences of beauty are serious and others trivial. Or that some things are right and others wrong. To what standard are we appealing? Before what judge do we argue our case? I’m not trying to tear you down, by the way—I occupy what I suspect is exactly your position. I can’t believe that the difference between right and wrong is simply a matter of taste or preference; but I also can’t bring myself to believe in absolute morality, which is to say, in God. This leaves me in a philosophical nowhere place, lacking the courage of my convictions on both sides. I can’t have the satisfaction of feeling that I serve God by doing right, and yet the idea of doing wrong disgusts me. Even more to the point, I find my own work morally and politically worthless, and yet it’s what I do with my life, the only thing I want to do.

  When I was younger, I think what I wanted was to travel the world, to lead a glamorous life, to be celebrated for my work, to marry a great intellectual, to reject everything I had been raised with, to cut myself off from the narrow world. I feel very embarrassed by all that now, but I was lonely and unhappy, and I didn’t understand that these feelings were ordinary, that there was nothing singular about my loneliness, my unhappiness. Maybe if I had understood that, as I think I do now, at least a little bit, I would never have written those books, I would never have become this person. I don’t know. I know that I couldn’t write them again, or feel the way I felt about myself at that time. It was important to me then to prove that I was a special person. And in my attempt to prove it, I made it true. Only afterwards, when I had received the money and acclaim which I believed I deserved, did I understand that it was not possible for anyone to deserve these things, and by then it was too late. I had already become the person I had once longed to be, and now energetically despised. I don’t say this to slight my work. But why should anyone be rich and famous while other people live in desperate poverty?

  The last time I fell in love, it ended badly, as you know, and then in the aftermath I wrote two novels. While I was in love, I tried to write a little here and there, but my thoughts always returned to the object of my affection, and my feelings ran back inexorably toward her, so my work could never develop any substance of its own, and I had no meaningful place for it in my life. We were happy, and then we were unhappy, and after some misery and recrimination, we broke up—and only then could I start giving myself to my work in a serious way. It was like I had cleared a space inside myself, and I had to fill it up somehow, and that’s how I came to sit down and write. I had to empty my life out first and begin from there. Looking back now on the period when I wrote the books, I feel like it was a good time in my life, because I had work I needed to do, and I did it. I was perennially broke, and lonely, and anxious about money, but I also had this other thing, this part of my life which was secret and protected, and my thoughts returned to it all the time, and my feelings orbited around it, and it belonged to me completely. In a way it was like a love affair, or an infatuation, except that it only involved myself and it was all within my own control. (The opposite of a love affair, then.) For all the frustration and difficulty of writing a novel, I knew from the beginning of the process that I had been given something very important, a special gift, a blessing. It was like God had put his hand on my head and filled me with the most intense desire I had ever felt, not desire for another person, but desire to bring something into being that had never existed before. When I look back at those years, I feel touched and almost pained by the simplicity of the life I was living, because I knew what I had to do, and I did it, that was all.

  Other than a little criticism and some very long emails, I haven’t written anything now for almost two years. And I think the space in my life has been cleared out at this stage, and it’s empty, and maybe for that reason it’s time for me to fall in love again. I need to feel that my life has some kind of centre, somewhere for my thoughts to return and rest. I know, by the way, that most people don’t need any such thing, and I would be much healthier if I didn’t. Felix doesn’t feel the need to arrange his life around a central principle, and I don’t think you do either. Simon does, but he has God. When it comes to putting something at the centre of life, God strikes me as a good option—better at least than making up stories about people who don’t exist, or falling in love with people who hate me. But here we are. It’s still better to love something than nothing, better to love someone than no one, and I’m here, living in the world, not wishing for a moment that I wasn’t. Isn’t that in its own way a special gift, a blessing, something very important? Eileen, I am sorry, and I do miss you. When we see each other after all these emails I’m going to get very shy and hide my head under my wing like a little bird. Give your sister and her groom my best wishes this weekend—and then, if it’s not too much trouble, come and see me, please.

  23.

  On the morning of the wedding, Eileen sat on the bed in the bridal suite while Lola was at the dressing table. Touching a finger to her face, Lola said: I think she did the eyes too heavy. She was wearing a white wedding gown, strapless, simple in its shape. You look beautiful, said Eileen. Their eyes met in the mirror and Lola grimaced, rose, went to the window. Outside, the early afternoon was white, casting a thin watery light, but Lola stood with her back to the glass, facing Eileen, studying her where she sat on the ample mattress. For a time they looked at one another, aggrieved, guilty, mistrustful, contrite. Finally Lola said: Well? Eileen glanced down at a thin gold watch she wore on her left wrist. It’s only ten to, she said. She was wearing a pale-green dress, celadon, her hair pinned back, she was thinking of something else then, they both were. Lola remembered paddling in the sea at Strandhill, or was it Rosses Point that day, or Enniscrone. The gritty texture of sand under her fingernails and in her scalp, also the taste of salt. Then she had fallen and found herself swallowing seawater, painful in her nose and throat, a confusion of light and sensation, she remembered crying, and being carried up the beach in her father’s arms. A red-and-orange towel. Later, driving back to Sligo town, strapped into the back seat, with the radio crackling, pinpoints of light visible in the distance. In the darkness by the side of the road, a van that sold sausages and chips, the hatch open, the sting of vinegar. Sleeping in a cousin’s bedroom that night, with different books on the shelf, the furniture casting different shadows in the light from an unfamiliar window. At midnight the cathedral bells. Downstairs the adults were talking, downstairs the lights were on and there were glasses of beer. Eileen was thinking also of childhood, one of Lola’s make-believe games, a hidden kingdom, palaces, dukes and peasants, enchanted rivers, forests, lights in the sky. All the twists and turns were lost now, the invented names in magic languages, the loyalties and betrayals. What remained were the real-life places over which the fictive world had been imposed: the cowshed behind their house, the overgrown reaches of the garden, gaps behind hedges, the damp shale running down to the river. And in the house: the attic, the staircase, the coat closet. Still these places gave Eileen a special feeling, or at least she could, if she willed, tune into a special feeling that was in them, an aesthetic frequency. They filled her with pleasure, with a thrill of something like excitement. Like good stationery, heavy pens, unlined paper, they represented to her the possibility of imagination, a possibility so much finer in itself and more delicate than anything she had ever managed to imagine. No, her imagination let her down. It was something other people either had or didn’t want anyway. Eileen wanted and didn’t have it. Like Alice in her moral philosophy, she was caught between two positions. Maybe everyone was,
in everything that mattered. At a knock on the door they looked up and their mother Mary entered, wearing her blue dress, her patent shoes, a feather dangling upright in her hair. Then they all began talking, quickly, remonstrating, laughing, complaining, adjusting each other’s clothing, and the activity in the room was rapid and noisy, like the activity of birds. Lola wanted to repin Eileen’s hair, to make it looser at the back, and Mary wanted to try on at the last minute an alternative pair of shoes, and Eileen, with her slim white arms like reeds, like branches, began to unpin her hair, held a shawl up to Mary’s shoulders, removed a stray eyelash from Lola’s powdered cheekbone, laughing, speaking in a quick light voice and breaking into laughter once again. Mary too was thinking of her childhood, their little terraced house with the shop next door, slivers of ice cream between wafers, chequered oilcloth on the kitchen table, patterned crockery behind glass. Cold bright summer days, air clear as cold water, and the gorse a blaze of yellow. To think of childhood gave her a funny queasy feeling, because it had been real life once and now it was something else. The old people had died, the babies had grown old. It would happen also to Eileen, also to Lola, who were young and beautiful now, loving and hating one another, laughing with white teeth, smelling of perfume. Another knock sounded on the door, and they fell silent and looked around. Their father Pat entered. How are the women, he said. It was time to go to the church then, the car was waiting, Pat was wearing his suit. He was thinking about his wife, about Mary, how like a stranger she had seemed to him the first time she was pregnant, how something had come over her, some seriousness, some strange purpose in her words, in her movements, and he found it uncomfortable, it made him want to laugh, he didn’t know why. She was changing, turning her face away from him, toward some other experience. In time it passed, Lola was born, healthy thank God, and he told himself they’d never do it again. Too much strangeness for one life. As usual, as usual, he had been wrong. Outside, the air stirred the trees, sifted its cool breath over their faces. They climbed into the car together. Lola pressed her nose to the window and left a tiny circle of powder on the glass. The church was squat and grey with long thin stained-glass windows, rose-coloured and blue and amber. As they entered, the electric organ played, the scent of incense touched them, damp and fragrant, and the rustle of cloth, the creaking of pews, as everyone stood and watched them processing together up the polished floor of the aisle, Lola stately and magnificent in white, radiant with the realisation of cherished plans, accepting with composure the gazes offered to her, not bowed but upright, Pat in his suit, dignified, tender in his awkwardness, Mary smiling nervously, clutching Eileen’s hand with a damp grip, and Eileen herself slim and pale in green, dark hair pinned loosely behind her, arms bare, head held aloft on her long neck like a flower, and turning her eyes quietly she looked for him but did not see him. Matthew was waiting at the altar, frightened, joyful, and the priest spoke, the vows were exchanged. O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely. Afterwards on the gravel outside the church, the white daylight, the chill of wind, spindly fingers of foliage, everyone laughing, shaking hands, embracing. The bridal party stood together under a tree to have their photograph taken, inching closer and further apart, murmuring to one another with fixed smiles. Only then Eileen saw him, Simon, standing at the church door watching her. They looked at one another for a long moment without moving, without speaking, and in the soil of that look many years were buried. He remembered when she was born, the Lydons’ new baby, and the first time he was allowed to see her, the red wrinkled face more like an old creature than something new, baby Eileen, and his parents said he was always asking for a sister after that, not just any sibling, a sister, like what Lola had. She remembered him too, the older boy who went to a different school, lively, intelligent, with those strange seizures he suffered from, an object of sympathy among the adults, which made him, though he was a beautiful child, somehow freakish. Her mother always saying how lovely his manners were, a little gentleman. And she was the adolescent girl he remembered, thin and freckled, standing at the kitchen counter with her legs twisted one around the other, fifteen, always frowning. Speaking not at all or suddenly and too much, her bad tempers, her friendlessness. And those frank looks she turned on him, pink in the face and almost cross. He was that too, for her, the boy, the young man of twenty, who helped out on the farm for the summer, she had seen him, with incomparable tenderness, bottle-feeding a baby lamb, she would spend a week in agony over a glance from him, the breath knocked out of her when she entered a room to find him there. The day all three of them cycled to the woods and left their bikes in a clearing together. Dark clouds surreal-looking behind bright sunlit treetops. Lola telling a long, embellished story about someone who had been murdered in the forest, Simon murmuring things like, Hm, I’m not sure about that, and, Oh dear, that’s a bit grisly, isn’t it? Eileen absorbed in kicking a pebble along the path before her, occasionally glancing up at Simon to observe his face. Stabbed so many times she was almost decapitated, Lola was saying. Gosh, said Simon, I’d rather not think about it. Lola laughed and told him he was a mouse. Well, if it comes to that, I am a bit, he said. It was starting to rain then and Lola untied her jacket from around her waist. You’re like Eileen, she said. He looked over at Eileen and said: I’d like to be more like her. Lola said that Eileen was only a baby. In a quick, heated, strangely loud voice, Eileen said: Imagine someone saying that to you when you were my age. Lola looked around at her sympathetically. But to be fair, she answered, when I was your age I was a lot more mature. Simon said he thought Eileen was very mature. Lola frowned and said: Don’t be creepy. Simon’s ears were red then and his voice came out sounding different. I meant intellectually, he said. He didn’t say anything else and neither did Lola, but neither of them were happy. Lola put her hood up against the rain and walked ahead. With fast long strides she marched on around a bend in the path, out of sight. Eileen looked down at the path, which had been dry dirt and was now turning to mud, little streams running between the stones. The rain was growing harder, making a pattern of dark dots on the front of her jeans, wetting her hair. When they came around the next bend, Lola still wasn’t visible. She might have been further ahead, or she might have gone down some other path. Do you know where we are? Eileen asked. Simon smiled and said he thought so. We won’t get lost, he said, don’t worry. We might get drowned, though. Eileen wiped her forehead with her sleeve. Hopefully no one will come along and stab us thirty-eight times, she remarked. Simon laughed. The victims always seem to be on their own in those stories, he said. So I think we’ll be fine. Eileen said that was all very well unless he was the murderer. He laughed again. No, no, he said. You’re safe with me. She glanced up at him again, shyly. I feel that way, she said. He looked around at her and said: Hm? She shook her head, wiped her face with her sleeve again, swallowed. I feel that I’m safe, she said, when I’m with you. For a few seconds Simon was silent. Presently he said: That’s nice. I’m glad to hear it. She watched him. Then with no warning she stopped walking and stood under a tree. Her face and hair were very wet. When Simon noticed she was no longer beside him, he turned around. Hello, he said. What are you doing? She gazed at him with intense concentration in her eyes. 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, o
kay? 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 was spending 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. Facing this way, please, the photographer said. Simon inclined his head and let her turn away. When the photographs were finished, the party dispersed across the gravel, talking, waving, and she went to him where he was standing on the step. You look very beautiful, he said. Her face was flushed, she was holding a bouquet of flowers in her arms. Already someone else was calling her, wanting something. Simon, she said. Tenderly, it seemed almost painfully, they smiled at one another, saying nothing, and their questions were the same, am I the one you think about, when we made love were you happy, have I hurt you, do you love me, will you always. From the church gate now, her mother was calling her name. Reaching to touch Simon’s hand Eileen said: I’ll be back. He nodded, he was smiling at her. Don’t worry, he said. I’ll be here.