Eileen rested her head on Alice’s small shoulder. Patting her back, Alice said softly: You’re not like me. You’re going to have a happy life. Simon was living in Paris that summer, working for a climate emergency group. Eileen went to visit him there, the first time she had ever got on a plane alone. He met her at the airport and they took a train into the city. That night they drank a bottle of wine in his apartment and she told him the story of how she lost her virginity. He laughed and apologised for laughing.
They were lying on the bed in his room together. After a pause, Eileen said: I was going to ask how you lost your virginity. But then, for all I know, you still haven’t. He smiled at that. No, I have, he said. For a few seconds she lay quietly with her face turned up toward the ceiling, breathing. Even though you’re Catholic, she said. They were lying close together, their shoulders almost touching. Right, he answered. What does Saint Augustine say? Lord, give me chastity, but not yet.
After graduating, Eileen started a Master’s degree in Irish Literature, and Alice got a job in a coffee shop and started writing a novel. They were still living together, and in the evenings Alice sometimes read aloud the good jokes from her manuscript while Eileen was cooking dinner. Sitting at the kitchen table, pushing her hair back from her forehead, Alice would say: Listen to this. You know the main guy I was telling you about? Well, he gets a text from the sister character. In Paris, Simon had moved in with his girlfriend, a French woman named Natalie. After finishing her Master’s, Eileen got a job in a bookshop, wheeling loaded trolleys across the shop floor to be unloaded and placing individual adhesive price stickers onto individual copies of bestselling novels.
By then her parents had run into financial trouble with the farm. On Eileen’s visits home, her father Pat was sullen and restless, pacing around the house at strange hours, switching things off and on. At dinner he barely spoke, and often left the table before the others had finished eating. In the living room one night when they were alone, her mother Mary told her that something would have to change. It can’t go on like this, she said. With a concerned expression, Eileen asked whether she meant the financial situation or her marriage. Mary turned her hands palm up, looking exhausted, looking older than she really was. Everything, she said. I don’t know. You come home complaining about your job, complaining about your life. What about my life? Who’s
taking care of me? Eileen was twenty-three then and her mother was fifty-one. Eileen held her fingertips lightly against one of her eyelids for a moment, and said: Aren’t you complaining to me about your life right now? Mary started crying then. Eileen watched her uneasily, and said: I really care that you’re unhappy, I just don’t know what you want me to do. Her mother was covering her face, sobbing. What did I do wrong? she said. How did I raise such selfish children? Eileen sat back against the sofa as if she was giving the question serious thought. What outcome do you want here? she asked. I can’t give you money. I can’t go back in time and make you marry a different man. You want me to listen to you complaining about it? I’ll listen. I am listening. But I’m not sure why you think your unhappiness is more important than mine. Mary left the room.
When they were twenty-four, Alice signed an American book deal for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. She said no one in the publishing industry knew anything about money, and that if they were stupid enough to give it to her, she was avaricious enough to take it. Eileen was dating a PhD student named Kevin, and through him had found a low-paid but interesting job as an editorial assistant at a literary magazine. At first she was just copy-editing, but after a few months they allowed her to start commissioning new pieces, and at the end of the year the editor invited her to contribute some of her own work. Eileen said she would think about it. Lola was working at a management consultancy firm then and had a boyfriend called Matthew. She invited Eileen to have dinner with them in town one night. On a Thursday evening after work, the three of them waited forty-five minutes on an increasingly dark and chilly street to be seated in a new burger restaurant Lola particularly wanted to try. When the burgers arrived, they tasted normal. Lola asked Eileen about her career plans and Eileen said she was happy at the magazine. Right, for now, said Lola. But what’s next? Eileen told her she didn’t
know. Lola made a smiling face and said: One day you’re going to have to live in the real world. Eileen walked back to the apartment that night and found Alice on the sofa, working on her book. Alice, she said, am I going to have to live in the real world one day? Without looking up, Alice snorted and said: Jesus no, absolutely not. Who told you that?
The following September, Eileen found out from her mother that Simon and Natalie had broken up. They had been together for four years by then. Eileen told Alice she had thought they would get married. I always thought they were going to get married, she would say. And Alice would answer: Yeah, you’ve mentioned that. Eileen sent Simon an email asking how he was, and he wrote back: I don’t suppose you’re going to find yourself in Paris any time soon? I would really like to see you. At Halloween she went to stay with him for a few days. He was thirty by then and she was twenty-five. They went out to museums together in the afternoons and talked about art and politics.
Whenever she asked him about Natalie he responded lightly, self-effacingly, and changed the subject. Once, when they were sitting together in the Musée d’Orsay, Eileen said to him: You know everything about me, and I know nothing about you.