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