A moment later she heard the toilet flush. Then she heard gargling. It seemed to be a bit noisier than necessary.
‘Are you all right?’ Dan asked, when he came into the bedroom. His voice, she realised, didn’t sound like she remembered. It sounded emptier. A bit colder. Maybe it was tiredness. Maybe it was stress. Maybe it was beer. Maybe it was marriage.
Maybe it was something else.
It was hard to remember, exactly, what he had sounded like before. What he had been like, precisely. But that was the nature of memory. At university she had done an essay drily titled ‘The Principles of Hobbesian Memory and Imagination’. Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.
Outside the window the streetlamp’s yellow glow illuminated the desolate village road.
‘Nora? You’re acting strange. Why are you just standing in the middle of the room? Are you getting ready for bed or are you doing some kind of standing meditation?’
He laughed. He thought he was funny.
He went over to the window and pulled the curtains. Then he took off his jeans and put them on the back of a chair. She stared at him and tried to feel the attraction she had once felt so deeply. It seemed to require a Herculean effort. She hadn’t expected this.
Everyone’s lives could have ended up an infinite number of ways.
He collapsed heavily on the bed, a whale into the ocean. Picked upZero to Hero. Tried to focus. Put it down. Picked up a laptop by the bed, shoved an earphone into his ear. Maybe he was going to listen to a podcast.
‘I’m just thinking about something.’
She began to feel faint. As if she was only half there. She remembered Mrs Elm talking about how disappointment in a life would bring her back to the library. It would feel, she realised, altogether too strange to climb into the same bed with a man she hadn’t seen for two years.
She noticed the time on the digital alarm clock. 12:23.
Still with the earphone in his ear, he looked at her again. ‘Right, listen, if you don’t want to make babies tonight you can just say, you know?’
‘What?’
‘I mean, I know we’ll have to wait another month until you are ovulating again ...’
‘We’re trying for a baby? I want a baby?’
‘Nora, what’s with you? Why are you strange today?’
She took off her shoes. ‘I’m not.’
A memory came to her, related to theJawsT-shirt.
A tune, actually. ‘Beautiful Sky’.
The day she had bought Dan theJawsT-shirt had been the day she had played him a song she had written for The Labyrinths. ‘Beautiful Sky’. It was, she was convinced, the best song she had ever written. And – more than that – it was a happy song to reflect her optimism at that point in her life. It was a song inspired by her new life with Dan. And he had listened to it with a shruggish indifference that had hurt at the time and which she would have addressed if it hadn’t been his birthday.
‘Yeah,’ he’d said. ‘It’s okay.’
She wondered why that memory had stayed buried, only to rise up now, like the great white shark on his fading T-shirt.
There were other things coming back to her now too. His over-the-top reaction when she’d once told him about a customer – Ash, the surgeon and amateur guitar player who came into String Theory for the occasional songbook – casually asking Nora if she wanted to go for a coffee some time.
(‘Of course I said no. Stop shouting.’)
Worse, though, was when an A&R man for a major label (or rather, a boutique former indie label with Universal behind them) wanted to sign The Labyrinths. Dan had told her that it was unlikely they’d survive as a couple. He’d also heard a horror story from one of his university friends who’d been in a band that signed to a label and then the label ripped them off and they’d all become unemployed alcoholics or something.
‘I could take you with me,’ she said. ‘I’d get it in the contract. We could go everywhere together.’
‘Sorry, Nora. But that’syourdream. It’s not mine.’
Which hurt even more with hindsight, knowing how much – before the wedding – she’d tried to make his dream of a pub in the Oxfordshire countryside become her dream as well.
