The Midnight Library - Matt Haig Page 0,62

over. No player should give up if there were pieces still left on the board.

She straightened her back and stood up tall.

‘You need to choose more lives from the bottom or top shelves. You have been seeking to undo your most obvious regrets. The books on the higher and lower shelves are the lives a little bit further removed. Lives you are still living in one universe or another but not ones you have been imagining or mourning or thinking about. They are lives you could live but never dreamed of.’

‘So they’re unhappy lives?’

‘Some will be, some won’t be. It’s just they are not the most obvious lives. They are ones which might require a little imagination to reach. But I am sure you can get there . . .’

‘Can’t you guide me?’

Mrs Elm smiled. ‘I could read you a poem. Librarians like poems.’ And then she quoted Robert Frost. ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference . . .’

‘What if there are more than two roads diverging in the wood? What if there are more roads than trees? What if there is no end to the choices you could make? What would Robert Frost do then?’

She remembered studying Aristotle as a first-year Philosophy student. And being a bit depressed by his idea that excellence was never an accident. That excellent outcomes were the result of ‘the wise choice of many alternatives’. And here she was, in the privileged position of being able to sample these many alternatives. It was a shortcut to wisdom and maybe a shortcut to happiness too. She saw it now not as a burden but a gift to be cherished.

‘Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs Elm, softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’

She took a seat at the chess table, opposite Mrs Elm. She stared down at the board and moved a pawn two spaces forward.

Mrs Elm mirrored the move on her side of the board.

‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibility.’

Nora moved one of her knights. They progressed like this for a little while.

Mrs Elm provided a commentary. ‘At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.’

Eventually, Nora won the game. She had a sneaky suspicion that Mrs Elm had let her, but still she was feeling a bit better.

‘Okey-dokey,’ said Mrs Elm. ‘Now, time for a book, I reckon. What do you say?’

Nora gazed along the bookshelves. If only they had more specific titles. If only there was one that said Perfect Life Right Here.

Her initial instinct had been to ignore Mrs Elm’s question. But where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them. And she realised it was the same with lives.

Mrs Elm repeated something she said earlier.

‘Never underestimate the big importance of small things.’

This was useful, as it turned out.

‘I want,’ she said, ‘a gentle life. The life where I worked with animals. Where I chose the animal shelter job – where I did my work experience at school – over the one at String Theory. Yes. Give me that one, please.’

A Gentle Life

It turned out that this particular existence was quite easy to slip into.

Sleep was good in this life, and she didn’t wake up until the alarm went off at a quarter to eight. She drove to work in a tatty old Hyundai that smelled of dogs and biscuits and was decorated with crumbs, passing the hospital and