In the morning his alarm rang at eight and woke them both, Simon sitting up on his elbow to turn it off, Eileen lying on her back, rubbing her eye with her fingers. Around the edges of the blind leaked a rectangle of white daylight. Do you have plans this morning? she asked. He put his phone back on the bedside table. I was going to go to the nine o’clock Mass, he said. But I can go later, it doesn’t make any difference. She lay with her eyes closed, looking happy, her hair disarranged on the pillow. Can I come with you? she said. He looked down at her for a moment, and then answered simply: Of course you can. They got out of bed together and he made coffee while she was in the
shower. She came out of the bathroom wrapped in a large white towel, and they kissed against the kitchen countertop. What if I think bad thoughts at Mass? she asked. He rubbed the back of her neck where her hair was damp. Like about last night? he said.
We didn’t do anything bad. She kissed the shoulder seam of his T-shirt. He made breakfast then while she got dressed. At a few minutes to nine they left the house and walked to the church together. Inside, it was cool and mostly empty, smelling of damp and incense. The priest read from Luke and gave a sermon about compassion. During communion, the choir sang ‘Here I Am, Lord’。 Eileen let Simon out of the pew and watched him queue with the other members of the congregation, most of them elderly.
From the gallery behind them the choir was singing: I will make their darkness bright.
Eileen shifted in her seat to keep Simon in sight as he reached the altar and received communion. Turning away, he blessed himself. She sat with her hands in her lap. He looked up at the vast domed ceiling above them, and his lips were moving silently. With a searching expression she watched him. He came and took his seat beside her, laying his hand on hers, and his hand was heavy and very still. Then he knelt down beside her on the cushioned hassock attached to the pew. Bowing his head over his hands, he did not look grave or serious, only calm, and his lips were no longer moving. Lacing her fingers together in her lap, she watched him. The choir sang: I have heard you calling in the night. Simon blessed himself once more and sat up beside her again. She moved her hand toward him and calmly he took it in his and held it, smoothing his thumb slowly over the little ridges of her knuckles. They sat like that until the Mass was over. On the street outside they were smiling again, and their smiles were mysterious. It was a cool bright Sunday morning, the white facades of buildings reflected the sunlight, traffic was
passing, people were out walking dogs, calling to each other across the street. Simon kissed Eileen’s cheek, and they wished one another goodbye.
12
Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life? I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day. We can wait, if you like, to ascend to some higher plane of being, at which point we’ll start directing all our mental and material resources toward existential questions and thinking nothing of our own families, friends, lovers, and so on. But we’ll be waiting, in my opinion, a long time, and in fact we’ll die first. After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person? So in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you so derisively call ‘breaking up or staying together’ （！）， because at the end of our lives, when there’s nothing left in front of us, it’s still the only thing we want to talk about.
Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing.
And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead.
Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive – because we are so stupid about each other.
As to this last point, I speak from personal experience. On the way home from a birthday thing last night, I kind of randomly got off the bus at Grove Park and walked
over to Simon’s house. I suppose I was a little bit drunk and feeling bad about myself, and maybe I thought I could rely on him to rub my shoulders and give me compliments.