Мэтт Хейг - The Midnight Library

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.