Chapter 15

Simon is at home in the evening, still dealing with work issues, when he begins to receive text messages from Eileen. When she says she is doing nothing at the moment, he invites her to his apartment, and she arrives twenty minutes later. She tells him that her family are “at war” over Lola’s wedding invitations and shows him Lola’s abusive text messages to her. Simon is shocked at the hostility and says Lola and Mary, her mother, are both crazy. He then talks about his own father, who is continually angry with Simon and says he has a “Messiah complex.”

Eileen says that she thinks Simon’s father is jealous of him because he is successful and well-liked. She confesses that she likes being protected and even told what to do by Simon and that she sees him as something of a paternal figure. He tells her she is a “good girl,” and they make love. Afterward, Simon thanks her, but she says that she wanted sex just as much as he did. The two of them eat ice cream and watch Newsnight together.

Eileen says that Simon seems lonely and that she is lonely as well. When she feels particularly isolated, she calls him, and she wants him to feel he can call her in the same circumstances. They discuss Simon’s imaginary wife, whom Eileen invented during their first intimate phone call. Simon asks if he and Eileen will still be friends after he has found such a woman, and Eileen thinks they will not. Simon says that, if this is the case, he will never find her.

Chapter 16

Eileen writes to Alice, reminding her of her earlier message about Late Bronze Age collapse. She says that the collapse probably did not affect many people. Subsistence farmers would have gone on much as before. If the meaning of life is not materialistic, but simply to live and be with other people, then nothing very important collapsed.

Eileen describes a diary she used to keep, called “the life book,” in which she wrote down the good things that happened to her each day. At first, she found this easy and never missed a day, but after a few months she found that she struggled to complete it and that she was no longer having the same sensory experiences. She now feels that she is not the same person who wrote “the life book.” She was twenty-three years old then, and nothing seemed permanent. She had a sense of limitless possibility.

A couple of nights ago, Eileen says, she briefly seemed about to recapture this sense of beauty and possibility, but it shrank from her. Nonetheless, a world that has both Simon and Alice in it will always be beautiful, and a cause for gratitude, in her eyes.