There were two rings on her ring finger. Her old sapphire engagement ring was there – the same one she had taken off, through trembles and tears, over a year ago – accompanied by a simple silver wedding band.
Crackers.
She was wearing a watch. Not a digital one, in this life. An elegant, slender analogue one, with Roman numerals. It was about a minute after midnight.
How is this happening?
Her hands were smoother in this life. Maybe she used hand cream. Her nails shone with clear polish. There was some comfort in seeing the familiar small mole on her left hand.
Footsteps crunched on gravel. Someone was heading towards her down the driveway. A man, visible from the light of the pub windows and the solitary streetlamp. A man with rosy cheeks and grey Dickensian whiskers and a wax jacket. A Toby jug made flesh. He seemed, from his overly careful gait, to be slightly drunk.
‘Goodnight, Nora. I’ll be back on Friday. For the folk singer. Dan said he’s a good one.’
In this life she probably knew the man’s name. ‘Right. Yes, of course. Friday. It should be a great night.’
At least her voice sounded like her. She watched as the man crossed the road, looking left and right a few times despite the clear absence of traffic, and disappearing down a lane between the cottages.
It was really happening. This was actually it. This was the pub life. This was the dream made reality.
‘This is so very weird,’ she said into the night. ‘So. Very. Weird.’
A group of three left the pub then too. Two women and a man. They smiled at Nora as they walked past.
‘We’ll win next time,’ one of the women said.
‘Yes,’ replied Nora. ‘There’s always a next time.’
She walked up to the pub and peeked through the window. It seemed empty inside, but the lights were still on. That group must have been the last to leave.
The pub looked very inviting. Warm and characterful. Small tables and timber beams and a wagon wheel attached to a wall. A rich red carpet and a wood-panelled bar full of an impressive array of beer pumps.
She stepped away from the window and saw a sign just beyond the pub, past where the pavement became grass.
Quickly, she trotted over and read what it said.
LITTLEWORTH
Welcomes Careful Drivers
Then she noticed in the top centre of the sign a little coat of arms around which orbited the wordsOxfordshire County Council.
‘We did it,’ she whispered into the country air. ‘Weactuallydid it.’
This was the dream Dan had first mentioned to her while walking by the Seine in Paris, eating macarons they had bought on the Boulevard Saint-Michel.
A dream not of Paris but of rural England, where they would live together.
A pub in the Oxfordshire countryside.
When Nora’s mum’s cancer aggressively returned, reaching her lymph nodes and rapidly colonising her body, that dream was put on hold and Dan moved with her from London back to Bedford. Her mum had known of their engagement and had planned to stay alive long enough for the wedding. She had died four months too soon.
Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the life. Maybe this was first-time lucky, or second-time lucky.
She allowed herself an apprehensive smile.
She walked back along the path and crunched over the gravel, heading towards the side door the drunken, whiskery man in the wax jacket had recently departed from. She took a deep breath and stepped inside.
It was warm.
