She poured the wine into two glasses and didn’t comment on the blood-pressure monitor he had left out from that morning. Nor did he tell her that he had been feeling quite ill. They sat down at the large table in the living area.
‘It’s just …’ Wilbur began. ‘We’ve been separated for a long time. Sorry. Don’t mean to burden you with that.’
Nora shook her head. ‘Don’t apologise, please. That’s the danger of music. It can stir up all kinds of things.’
‘It can, it really can. And it … I don’t know. I’m ridiculous.’
‘You are not ridiculous, Wilbur. You’re a success story.’
‘I just wish I had managed to keep the person I loved happy.’
There was a moment of quiet. Nora frowned. She seemed to be making a decision to say something.
‘By the way, I don’t know what you believe, but there is probably a life where you are together …’ She took a breath. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m insensitive saying this, but today is quite an emotional day for me too.’
‘I see. In what way?’
‘Well, seven years ago to the day I did something stupid.’
‘I can’t imagine that. You seem so together.’
Nora gave a dry smile. ‘Life had got on top of me. Situational depression, they call it. Not the clinical type. Just the can’t-see-the-wood-for-the-trees kind.’ She laughed darkly. ‘There had just been a sort of traffic jam of, well,situations.’
Wilbur sipped his wine. ‘Ah. Yes. Situations.’
‘I felt like a failure. Like I’d made a lot of bad decisions. Letpeople down. Guilt. Regret. And one night I didn’t think I could go on, so I tried to take my life. And I came very close, you know, to doing it …’
Wilbur was genuinely upset. ‘I had no idea.’
‘It’s okay. It was actually good, in the end. On the edge of death, I … had an experience that made me see things differently.’ She took a breath. ‘I realised that somewhere out there I was all the things I wasn’t. And I realised that if you aim to be something you are not, you will fail. So I had to be who I was. The only way to learn is to live, it’s as simple as that.’
‘The only way to learn is to live,’echoed Wilbur, almost in a whisper.
The Dreamer looked at the Ghost as if he had solved a riddle. ‘That was our problem,’ he told him, looking into the Wilbur-on-honeymoon face so like his own. ‘Yourproblem. Trying to be someone that wasn’t really you.’
The Ghost realised he should have felt sad at this. After all, he had lived a life without being able to appreciate it. He had lost love and friendship along the way, but the bigger tragedy would have been to never have known those things at all. Life was about moments as much as it was about decades. And there had been some exceptional ones. Yes, he felt sad that he had squandered so many things, but there was no point running away from that sadness. Running away from sadness had been his whole problem. That was how he had shrunk a life while pretending to expand it. That was how he became a failure pretending it was success. So, yes, the Ghost was sad now. But he had once kissed Maggie under a Venetian moon. And just knowing that was a match for eternity.
He watched his eighty-one-year-old self looking out of his window.
The gardener, Josh, had arrived and was unpacking some equipment. Wilbur felt a twinge of pain in his chest, and winced a little.
‘Are you okay?’ Nora asked. Her face was pure concern. The purest he had seen in decades.
‘Yes,’ he smiled, trying to ease her worry. ‘And listen, Nora, I’m very proud of you. That you already know that life is not a race to be won.’ He stared out at Josh, pulling up weeds from a flowerbed. ‘I let Maggie down. I neglected her.’
Nora held his hand across the table. ‘But don’t be hard on yourself. You don’t know anything would have been better.’
‘That’s true. And you’re right. There is no perfect life.Youthough are in the centre of yourself. I feel I lived at the far reaches. I should have been closer. I was the luckiest man alive. I just couldn’t see it …’
Nora smiled kindly. ‘Well, maybe somewhere out there Maggie lived a million happy lives. With you. Without you. And you too. Those other lives are all real too. They’re all happening at once. And who knows what is after all this? Who knows what chances we get?’
Wilbur smiled a small but honest smile. ‘Thank you, Nora.’
A car pulled up outside. A minute later, the doorbell rang.
Nora laughed as she stared over at the piano. ‘Sorry about that. We haven’t had much of a lesson today.’
‘I beg to differ,’ said Wilbur. ‘I really think we have.’
