But then, last year, I couldn’t really imagine myself as Simon’s girlfriend. I don’t just mean that it was hard to imagine what our families would say, or what our friends would think. I mean, I couldn’t imagine we were going to be happy together. I thought it would be the same as everything else in my life – difficult and sad – because I was a difficult and sad person. But that’s not what I am anymore, if I ever was. And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy. It’s not just one thing or another – it doesn’t get fixed into a groove called
‘personality’ and then run along that way until the end. But I really used to believe that it did. Every evening now when we’ve finished our work, Simon turns on the news while I cook dinner, or I turn on the news while he cooks dinner, and we talk about the latest public health guidance, and what’s been reported about what everyone is saying in cabinet and what Simon has privately heard everyone is actually saying in cabinet, and then we eat and wash up, and afterwards I read him a chapter of ‘David Copperfield’
while we lie on the couch, and then we look through the trailers on various streaming services for an hour until one or both of us falls asleep and then we go to bed. And in
the morning I wake up feeling almost painfully happy. To live with someone I really love and respect, who really loves and respects me – what a difference it has made to my life. Of course everything is terrible at the moment, and I miss you ardently, and I miss my family, and I miss parties and book launches and going to the cinema, but all that really means is that I love my life, and I’m excited to have it back again, excited to feel that it’s going to continue, that new things will keep happening, that nothing is over yet.
I wish I knew what you thought of all this. I still have no idea what it will be like – what it will feel like, or how the days will pass, whether I’ll still want to write or be able to, what will become of my life. I suppose I think that having a child is simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing. And I want that – to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care. To prove it to whom, I wonder. Myself, maybe. Anyway: no one else knows, and we’re not going to tell anyone for a few more weeks, except for you and Felix. You can tell him if you want, of course, or Simon can tell him on the phone. I know that it’s not the life you imagined for me, Alice – buying a house and having children with a boy I grew up with.
It’s not the life I used to imagine for myself either. But it’s the life I have, the only one.
And as I write you this message I’m very happy. All my love.
Acknowledgements
The title of this book is a literal translation of a phrase from Friedrich Schiller’s poem
‘Die G?tter Griechenlandes’ （‘The Gods of Greece’）， first published in 1788. In the original German, the phrase reads: ‘Sch?ne Welt, wo bist du?’ Franz Schubert set a fragment of the poem to music in 1819. Beautiful World, Where Are You? was also the title of the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, which I visited during the Liverpool Literary Festival in October of that year.
I would like to acknowledge here some of the support I received while I worked on this book. Above all, I want to thank my husband, who makes it possible for me to live and work the way I do. John, I can only try to express in my writing some small measure of the love and happiness you have brought into my life. And to my friends Aoife Comey and Kate Oliver: I am grateful every day for your friendship, and I can never thank you enough.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to John Patrick McHugh, whose excellent early feedback led me to find a much-needed new direction for this book. And I am likewise indebted to my editor Mitzi Angel, who from the beginning helped me to see what was good in the novel, and how it could be better. I also want to thank Alex Bowler for his thorough and very insightful notes. Further thanks, personal and professional, to Thomas Morris, and to my agent and dear friend Tracy Bohan. For conversations that helped me to tease out the problems of the book, and in some cases for help with factual and practical queries, I would like to thank – as well as those mentioned above – Sheila, Emily, Zadie, Sunniva, William, Katie and Marie.
I spent a blissful period working on this novel at Santa Maddalena in Tuscany. I would like to thank Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori and the Santa Maddalena Foundation for their generosity in inviting me to take part in a residency there. And to Rasika, Sean, Nico, Kate, Fredrik – how can I ever thank you for those heavenly weeks?