Nora smiled back as if she knew who Ewan was and exactly what he was like. ‘Yeah. He’s great. I’m so happy for you both.’
He laughed. ‘We’ve been married five years now. You’re talking as if me and him have just got together.’
‘No, I’m just, you know, I sometimes think that you’re lucky. So in love. And happy.’
‘He wants a dog.’ He smiled. ‘That’s our current debate. I mean, I wouldn’t mind a dog. But I’d want a rescue. And I wouldn’t want a bloody Maltipoo or a Bichon. I’d want a wolf. You know, a proper dog.’
Nora thought of Voltaire. ‘Animals are good company ...’
‘Yeah. You still want a dog?’
‘I do. Or a cat.’
‘Cats are too disobedient,’ he said, sounding like the brother she remembered. ‘Dogs know their place.’
‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.’
He looked perplexed. ‘Where didthatcome from? Is that a quote?’
‘Yeah. Henry David Thoreau. You know, my fave philosopher.’
‘Since when were you into philosophy?’
Of course. In this life she’d never have done a Philosophy degree. While her root self had been reading the works of Thoreau and Lao Tzu and Sartre in a stinky student flat in Bristol, her current self had been standing on Olympic podiums in Beijing. Weirdly, she felt just as sad for the version of her who had never fallen in love with the simple beauty of Thoreau’sWalden, or the stoical Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, as she had felt sympathy for the version of her who never fulfilled her Olympic potential.
‘Oh, I don’t know ... I just came across some of his stuff on the internet.’
‘Ah. Cool. Will check him out. You could drop some of that into your speech.’
Nora felt herself go pale. ‘Um, I’m thinking of maybe doing something a little different today. I might, um, improvise a little.’
Improvising was, after all, a skill she’d been practising.
‘I saw this great documentary about Greenland the other night. Made me remember when you were obsessed with the Arctic and you cut out all those pictures of polar bears and stuff.’
‘Yeah. Mrs Elm said the best way to be an arctic explorer was to be a glaciologist. So that’s what I wanted to be.’
‘Mrs Elm,’ he whispered. ‘That rings a bell.’
‘School librarian.’
‘That was it. You used to live in that library, didn’t you?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Just think, if you hadn’t stuck with swimming, you’d be in Greenland right now.’
‘Svalbard,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s a Norwegian archipelago. Way up in the Arctic Ocean.’
‘Okay, Norway then. You’d be there.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe I’d just still be in Bedford. Moping around. Unemployed. Struggling to pay the rent.’
‘Don’t be daft. You’d have always done something big.’
