Мэтт Хейг - The Midnight Library

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.

In one life she had a teenage son called Henry, who she never met properly because he kept slamming doors in her face.

In one life she was a concert pianist, currently on tour in Scandinavia, playing night after night to besotted crowds (and fading into the Midnight Library during one disastrous rendition of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki).

In one life she only ate toast.

In one life she went to Oxford and became a lecturer in Philosophy at St Catherine’s College and lived by herself in a fine Georgian townhouse in a genteel row, amid an environment of respectable calm.

In another life Nora was a sea of emotion. She felt everything deeply and directly. Every joy and every sorrow. A single moment could contain both intense pleasure and intense pain, as if both were dependent on each other, like a pendulum in motion. A simple walk outside and she could feel a heavy sadness simply because the sun had slipped behind a cloud. Yet, conversely, meeting a dog who was clearly grateful for her attention caused her to feel so exultant that she felt she could melt into the pavement with sheer bliss. In that life she had a book of Emily Dickinson poems beside her bed and she had a playlist called ‘Extreme States of Euphoria’ and another one called ‘The Glue to Fix Me When I Am Broken’.

In one life she was a travel vlogger who had 1,750,000 YouTube subscribers and almost as many people following her on Instagram, and her most popular video was one where she fell off a gondola in Venice. She also had one about Rome called ‘A Roma Therapy’.

In one life she was a single parent to a baby that literally wouldn’t sleep.