‘Oh my goodness,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here? I thought I was only with Agnes.’
Miss Graham had been his favourite teacher. The one who fostered his love of books. The one who encouraged him to apply to Oxford. Short black hair and equally black polo neck, a little younger than he remembered her. She was smoking, as she always did. Even in class, she would stand near an open window and smoke away.
‘I’m not meant to be here,’ said Miss Graham, who had always had a rebellious streak. ‘But in eternity you see everything and I saw you and knew you were struggling, so I, well, I found a way.’
Wilbur was too bewildered to say anything of significance. So he just said: ‘It’s good to see you. So, you’re dead?’
‘Yup. Emphysema. 1975.’ She took a long drag of her cigarette. ‘I was only sixty-four. Still just about in the “gone too soon” zone. But you know what they say: it’s not the breadth of the years but the depth. I had a good life, you know. Lots of travel. Lots of adventures in every continent. Lots of lovers. Lots of fun.’
‘Right,’ said Wilbur. He might have been eighty-one years old, not to mention dead, but he still felt too young to hear about Miss Graham’s sex life.
‘My time teaching English literature at your school was possibly the most conventional period of my life,’ she clarified.
‘Well,’ said Wilbur. ‘That’s saying something.’
She had been an influence on him as a boy because she seemed quite rare for Yorkshire at that time. She was from London and had gone to Spain for a year during the Spanish Civil War, volunteering as a nurse. She had apparently met George Orwell while he was over there, fighting the same anti-fascist cause. And knew him well enough to call him his actual name, Eric.
She studied Wilbur a while.
‘“What’s done cannot be undone,”’ she said, looking upwards, grandly soliloquising as if on stage and trying to reach the gallery. ‘Macbeth. Act 5, Scene 1.’
‘It’s like I’m back at school.’
She smiled. ‘Remember how I would get the class to look at one extract here and another extract there? You were always good at analysing them, Wilbur. You were a rarity at school. Not a delinquent, not a teacher’s pet, you were just genuinelyinterested.’
‘Books were my escape.’
‘I was so proud of you, given all that happened, that you made a success of your life.’
‘I thought you would see it as a betrayal of my class. Becoming a successful businessman.’
‘Well, life is complicated. And listen, even at a school where everyone struggled it was clearyouhad less to work with …’
This unsettled him. Obviously it was true that he had struggled, but he hadn’t realised it was so visible.
‘Success is just the distance you travel from where you started. And you travelled far. You did well for yourself. And your crime was to be good at what you did and set up bookshops, for God’s sake. You were doing what you were good at.’
He smiled. Miss Graham had been a tough teacher. But also one who saw his potential. So to hear a compliment from her aboutthe rest of his life should have meant something. He felt a kind of filling up – an expanding – when someone said something like that. As though he was an empty vessel always waiting for some validation to be poured inside. But – and maybe it had been seeing Maggie – this time he just felt hollow.
‘Miss Graham—’
‘Please, call me Linda.’
‘Linda.’ That felt strange. It was interesting to discover that there was no point in or out of time where calling a schoolteacher by their given name felt natural. ‘You say success is just the distance from where you started but what if at some point you were travelling in the wrong direction? What if I didn’t really live? What if I found the person for me but was ultimately scared to keep that love alive? What if I was a coward who let someone down? What if I wanted another chance?’
Outside the window, he saw Alice and himself in the rain standing beneath a street lamp. She was leaving him. Not because of Oxford. But because his brother had been arrested for stealing from her dad’s carpet factory.
‘That, I believe, is why I decided to come here.’ Miss Graham shifted in her seat, and looked behind to check that Agnes wasn’t in their general vicinity. ‘Now, as you know, the point of this place is to see your past slide by and then stop inside it to get a closer look. I had about seven hundred stops. But I wasn’t on a train. I was on a boat. It was the boat from “The Owl and the Pussy-cat”. Beautiful, pea-green. I loved that story as a child. The mode of transport always seems to have some childhood connection. It’s interesting.’
‘Sevenhundred?’
‘Yes. But I know someone who only had three stops. It depends on who you are, and how able you are to assess your life.’
‘Will I have to relive, you know, the worst days?’
She blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling of the train, and profoundly gazed at it fading into the air.
‘I am not Agnes. I am not the all-knowing truth of the universe. Nor am I even a bookseller. I am just a ghost who can quoteMacbeth. But my guess is yes. We linger longer on the stuff that shaped us. As in life.’
