The Midnight Library (22 page)

‘Not really. I am happy here. Why want another universe if this one has dogs? Dogs are the same here as they are in London. I had a place, you know. I’d got into Glasgow University to do Veterinary Medicine. And I went for a week but I missed my dogs too much. Then my dad lost his job and couldn’t really afford for me to go. So yeah, I never got to be a vet. And I
really
wanted to be a vet. But I don’t regret it. I have a good life. I’ve got some good friends. I’ve got my dogs.’

Nora smiled. She liked Dylan, even if she doubted she could be as attracted to him as this other Nora. He was a good person, and good people were rare.

As they reached the restaurant, they saw a tall dark-haired man in running gear jogging towards them. It took a disorientating moment for Nora to realise it was Ash – the Ash who had been a surgeon, the Ash who had been a customer at String Theory and who had asked her out for coffee, the Ash who had comforted her in the hospital and who had knocked on her door, in another world, last night, to tell her that Voltaire was dead. It seemed so recent, that memory, and yet it was hers alone. He was obviously doing some training for the half-marathon on Sunday. There was no reason to believe that the Ash in this life was any different from
the one in her root life, except the chances were that he probably hadn’t found a dead Voltaire last night. Or maybe he had, though Voltaire wouldn’t have been called Voltaire.

‘Hi,’ she said, forgetting which timeline she was in.

And Ash smiled back at her, but it was a confused smile. Confused, but kind, which somehow made Nora feel even more cringey. Because of course in this life there had not been the knock on her door, there had never even been the asking for a coffee, or the purchase of a Simon & Garfunkel songbook.

‘Who was that?’ Dylan asked.

‘Oh, just someone I knew in another life.’

Dylan was confused but shook it away like rain.

And then they were there.

Dinner with Dylan

La Cantina had hardly changed in years.

Nora had a flashback to the evening she had taken Dan there years ago, on his first visit to Bedford. They’d sat at a table in a corner and had too many margaritas and talked about their joint future. It was the first time that Dan had expressed his dream of living in a pub in the country. They had been on the verge of moving in together, just as Nora and Dylan apparently were in this life. Now she remembered it, Dan had been pretty rude to the waiter, and Nora had overcompensated with excessive smiles. It was one of life’s rules –
Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff –
and Dan had failed at that one, and many of the others. Although Nora had to admit, La Cantina would not have been her top choice to return to.

‘I love this place,’ Dylan said now, looking around at the busy, garish red-and-yellow décor. Nora wondered, quietly, if there was any place Dylan didn’t or wouldn’t love. He seemed like he would be able to sit in a field near Chernobyl and marvel at the beautiful scenery.

Over black bean tacos, they talked about dogs and school. Dylan had been two years below Nora and remembered her primarily as ‘the girl who was good at swimming’. He even remembered the school assembly – which Nora had long tried to repress – where she had been called on stage and given a certificate for being an exceptional representative of Hazeldene Comp. Now she thought about it, that was possibly the moment Nora had begun to go off swimming. The moment she found it harder being with
her friends, the moment she slunk away into the margins of school life.

‘I used to see you in the library during breaks,’ he said, smiling at the memory. ‘I remember seeing you playing chess with that librarian we used to have . . . what was her name?’

‘Mrs Elm,’ Nora said.

‘That’s it! Mrs Elm!’ And then he said something even more startling. ‘I saw her the other day.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yeah. She was on Shakespeare Road. With someone dressed in a uniform. Like a nurse’s outfit. I think she was heading into the care home after a walk. She looked very frail. Very old.’

For some reason, Nora had assumed Mrs Elm had died years ago, and that the version of Mrs Elm she always saw in the library had made that idea more likely, as that version was always the exact version she had been at school, preserved in Nora’s memory like a mosquito in amber.

‘Oh no. Poor Mrs Elm. I loved her.’

Last Chance Saloon

After the meal Nora went back to Dylan’s house to watch the Ryan Bailey movie. They had a half-drunk bottle of wine that the restaurant let them take home. Her self-justification regarding going to Dylan’s was that he was sweet and open and would reveal a lot about their life without having to pry too deep.

He lived in a small terraced house on Huxley Avenue that he had inherited from his mum. The house was made even smaller by the amount of dogs there. There were five that Nora could see, though there may have been more lurking upstairs. Nora had always imagined she liked the smell of dog, but she suddenly realised there was a limit to this fondness.

Sitting down on the sofa she felt something hard beneath her – a plastic ring for the dogs to gnaw on. She put it on the carpet amid the other chew toys. The toy bone. The foam yellow ball with chunks bitten out of it. A half-massacred soft toy.

A Chihuahua with cataracts tried to have sex with her right leg.

‘Stop that, Pedro,’ said Dylan, laughing, as he pulled the little creature away from her.

Another dog, a giant, meaty, chestnut-coloured Newfoundland, was sitting next to her on the sofa, licking Nora’s ear with a tongue the size of a slipper, meaning that Dylan had to sit on the floor.

‘Do you want the sofa?’

‘No. I’m fine on the floor.’

Nora didn’t push it. In fact, she was quite relieved. It made it easier to watch
Last Chance Saloon
without any further awkwardness. And the Newfoundland stopped licking her ear and rested
its head on her knee and Nora felt – well, not happy exactly, but not depressed either.

And yet, as she watched Ryan Bailey tell his on-screen love interest that ‘Life is for living, cupcake’ while simultaneously being informed by Dylan that he was thinking of letting
another
dog sleep in his bed (‘He cries all night. He wants his daddy’), Nora realised she wasn’t too enamoured with this life.

And also, Dylan deserved the other Nora. The one who had managed to fall in love with him. This was a new feeling – as if she was taking someone’s place.

Realising she had a high tolerance for alcohol in this life, she poured herself some more wine. It was a pretty ropey Zinfandel from California. She stared at the label on the back. There was for some reason a mini co-autobiography of a woman and a man, Janine and Terence Thornton, who owned the vineyard which had made the wine. She read the last sentence:
When we were first married we always dreamed of opening our own vineyard one day. And now we have made that dream a reality. Here at Dry Creek Valley, our life tastes as good as a glass of Zinfandel
.

She stroked the large dog who’d been licking her and whispered a ‘goodbye’ into the Newfoundland’s wide, warm brow as she left Dylan and his dogs behind.

Buena Vista Vineyard

In the next visit to the Midnight Library, Mrs Elm helped Nora find the life she could have lived that was closest to the life depicted on the label of that bottle of wine from the restaurant. So, she gave Nora a book that sent her to America.

In this life Nora was called Nora Martìnez and she was married to a twinkle-eyed Mexican-American man in his early forties called Eduardo, who she had met during the gap year she’d regretted never having after leaving university. After his parents had died in a boating accident (she had learned, from a profile piece on them in
The Wine Enthusiast
magazine, which they had framed in their oak-panelled tasting room), Eduardo had been left a modest inheritance and they bought a tiny vineyard in California. Within three years they had done so well – particularly with their Syrah varietals – that they were able to buy the neighbouring vineyard when it came up for sale. Their winery was called the Buena Vista vineyard, situated in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and they had a child called Alejandro, who was at boarding school near Monterey Bay.

Much of their business came from wine-trail tourists. Coachloads of people arrived at hourly intervals. It was quite easy to improvise, as the tourists were genuinely quite gullible. It went like this: Eduardo would decide which wines to put out in the glasses before each coach load arrived, and hand Nora the bottles – ‘Woah, Nora, despacio, un poco too much’ he reprimanded in his good-humoured Spanglish, when she was a bit too liberal with the measures – and then when the tourists came Nora would inhale
the wines as they sipped and swilled them, and try to echo Eduardo and say the right things.

‘There is a woodiness to the bouquet with this one’ or ‘You’ll note the vegetal aromas here – the bright robust blackberries and fragrant nectarine, perfectly balanced with the echoes of charcoal’.

Each life she had experienced had a different feeling, like different movements in a symphony, and this one felt quite bold and uplifting. Eduardo was incredibly sweet-natured, and their marriage seemed to be a successful one. Maybe even one to rival the life of the couple on the wine label of the bottle of ropey wine she’d drank with Dylan, while being licked by his astronomically large dog. She even remembered their names. Janine and Terence Thornton. She felt like she too was now living in a label on a bottle. She also looked like it. Perfect Californian hair and expensive-looking teeth, tanned and healthy despite the presumably quite substantial consumption of Syrah. She had the kind of flat, hard stomach that suggested hours of Pilates every week.

However, it wasn’t just easy to fake wine knowledge in this life. It was easy to fake
everything
, which could have been a sign that the key to her apparently successful union with Eduardo was that he wasn’t really paying attention.

After the last of the tourists left, Eduardo and Nora sat out under the stars with a glass of their own wine in their hands.

‘The fires have died out in LA now,’ he told her.

Nora wondered who lived in the Los Angeles home she had in her pop star life. ‘That’s a relief.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she asked him, staring up at that clear sky full of constellations.

‘What?’

‘The galaxy.’

‘Yes.’

He was on his phone and didn’t say very much. And then he put his phone down and still didn’t say much.

She had known three types of silence in relationships. There was passive-aggressive silence, obviously, there was the we-no-longer-have-anything-to-say silence, and then there was the silence that Eduardo and she seemed to have cultivated. The silence of not
needing
to talk. Of just being together, of
together-being
. The way you could be happily silent with yourself.

But still, she wanted to talk.

‘We’re happy, aren’t we?’

‘Why the question?’

‘Oh, I know we are happy. I just like to hear you say it sometimes.’

‘We’re happy, Nora.’

She sipped her wine and looked at her husband. He was wearing a sweater even though it was perfectly mild. They stayed there a while and then he went to bed before her.

‘I’m just going to stay out here for a while.’

Eduardo seemed fine with that, and sloped off after planting a small kiss on the top of her head.

She stepped out with her glass of wine and walked among the moonlit vines.

She stared at the clear sky full of stars.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with this life, but she felt inside her a craving for other things, other lives, other possibilities. She felt like she was still in the air, not ready to land. Maybe she was more like Hugo Lefèvre than she had realised. Maybe she could flick through lives as easily as flicking pages.

She gulped the rest of the wine, knowing there would be no hangover. ‘Earth and wood,’ she said to herself. She closed her eyes.

It wasn’t long now.

Not long at all.

She just stood there and waited to disappear.

The Many Lives of Nora Seed

Nora came to understand something. Something Hugo had never fully explained to her in that kitchen in Svalbard. You didn’t have to enjoy every aspect of each life to keep having the option of experiencing them. You just had to never give up on the idea that there would be a life somewhere that could be enjoyed. Equally, enjoying a life didn’t mean you stayed in that life. You only stayed in a life for ever if you couldn’t imagine a better one, and yet, paradoxically, the more lives you tried the easier it became to think of something better, as the imagination broadened a bit more with every new life she sampled.

So, in time, and with Mrs Elm’s assistance, Nora took lots of books from the shelves, and ended up having a taste of lots of different lives in her search for the right one. She learned that undoing regrets was really a way of making wishes come true. There was almost
any
life she was living in one universe, after all.

In one life she had quite a solitary time in Paris, and taught English at a college in Montparnasse and cycled by the Seine and read lots of books on park benches. In another, she was a yoga teacher with the neck mobility of an owl.

In one life she had kept up swimming but had never tried to pursue the Olympics. She just did it for fun. In that life she was a lifeguard in the beach resort of Sitges, near Barcelona, was fluent in both Catalan and Spanish, and had a hilarious best friend called Gabriela who taught her how to surf, and who she shared an apartment with, five minutes from the beach.

There was one existence where Nora had kept up the fiction
writing she had occasionally toyed with at university and was now a published author. Her novel
The Shape of Regret
received rave reviews and was shortlisted for a major literary award. In that life she had lunch in a disappointingly banal Soho members’ club with two affable, easy-going producers from Magic Lantern Productions, who wanted to option it for film. She ended up choking on a piece of flatbread and knocking her red wine over one of the producer’s trousers and messing up the whole meeting.