Mrs Elm Quotes

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.’ ‘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 possibilities...In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living...never underestimate the big importance of small things.

Never underestimate the big importance of small things,’ Mrs Elm said. ‘You must always remember that.

Never underestimate the big importance of small things, Mrs Elm had said. You must always remember that.

Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’ ‘So, I am dead?’ Nora asked. Mrs Elm shook her head. ‘No. Listen carefully. Between life and death.’ She gestured vaguely along the aisle, towards the distance. ‘Death is outside.

She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before. She heard Mrs Elm’s voice, from under the table somewhere far behind her, cutting through the noise. ‘Don’t give up! Don’t you dare give up, Nora Seed!’ She didn’t want to die. And she didn’t want to live any other life than the one that was hers.

You need to realise something if you are ever to succeed at chess,’ she said, as if Nora had nothing bigger to think about. ‘And the thing you need to realise is this: the game is never over until it is over. It isn’t over if there is a single pawn still on the board. If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game. And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.' Mrs. Elm

It was hard not to compare Mrs Elm to her mother, who treated Nora like a mistake in need of correction.

Mrs Elm’s eyes sparkled with sudden life. ‘Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.’ And Nora smiled as she stared at all the pieces she still had left in play, thinking about her next move.

Sometimes the only way to learn is to live

Mrs. Elm smiled, like a teacher who saw a lesson being understood.

The elm is the most respectable of trees, over-pompous if anything, but perfectly well-bred, and the shade it casts is no ordinary shade, but solid and self-assured as befits the estate of a country family.

Many of you remember when Dutch Elm disease swept the East Coast. People in big cities saw the trees die but it didn’t register, in any way at all, that this would compromise oxygen. Think of it, that many trees dying in that short a time span means there is less photosynthesis. Less oxygen is being produced. Therefore pollution in the big cities becomes more pronounced. These basics do not occur to people who work in buildings where the windows don’t open.

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.’ ‘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 possibilities. At the beginning of the game there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are 9 million variations after the first 6 moves. And those possibilities keep growing. So it gets very messy. And there is no 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...never underestimate the big importance of small things.

Mrs. Wilcox, though a loving wife and mother, had only one passion in life—her house—and that the moment was solemn when she invited a friend to share this passion with her. To answer “another day” was to answer as a fool. “Another day” will do for brick and mortar, but not for the Holy of Holies into which Howards End had been transfigured. Her own curiosity was slight. She had heard more than enough about it in the summer. The nine windows, the vine, and the wych-elm had no pleasant connections for her, and she would have preferred to spend the afternoon at a concert. But imagination triumphed. While her brother held forth she determined to go, at whatever cost, and to compel Mrs. Wilcox to go, too.

My eye keeps escaping towards the big blue lacquered door that I've had painted in a trompe-l'oeil on the back wall. I would like to call Mrs. Cohen back and tell her there's no problem for her son's bar mitzvah, everything's ready: I would like to go through that door and disappear into the garden my mind's eye has painted behind it. The grass there is soft and sweet, there are bulrushes bowing along the banks of a river. I put lime trees in it, hornbeams, weeping elms, blossoming cherries and liquidambars. I plant it with ancient roses, daffodils, dahlias with their melancholy heavy heads, and flowerbeds of forget-me-nots. Pimpernels, armed with all the courage peculiar to such tiny entities, follow the twists and turns between the stones of a rockery. Triumphant artichokes raise their astonished arrows towards the sky. Apple trees and lilacs blossom at the same time as hellebores and winter magnolias. My garden knows no seasons. It is both hot and cool. Frost goes hand in hand with a shimmering heat haze. The leaves fall and grow again. row and fall again. Wisteria climbs voraciously over tumbledown walls and ancient porches leading to a boxwood alley with a poignant fragrance. The heady smell of fruit hangs in the air. Huge peaches, chubby-cheeked apricots, jewel-like cherries, redcurrants, raspberries, spanking red tomatoes and bristly cardoons feast on sunlight and water, because between the sunbeams it rains in rainbow-colored droplets. At the very end, beyond a painted wooden fence, is a woodland path strewn with brown leaves, protected from the heat of the skies by a wide parasol of foliage fluttering in the breeze. You can't see the end of it, just keep walking, and breathe.

Why did I stay?' Nora asked. 'Why didn't I just come home, after she died?' Mrs. Elm shrugged. 'You got stuck. You were grieving. You were depressed. You know what depression is like.' Nora understood this. She thought of a study she had read about somewhere, about fish. Fish were more like humans than most people think. Fish get depression. They had done tests with zebrafish. They had a fish tank and they drew a horizontal line on the side of it, halfway down, in marker pen. Depressed fish stayed below the line. But give those same fish Prozac and they go above the line, to the top of their tanks, darting about like new. Fish get depressed when they have a lack of stimulation. A lack of everything. When they are just there, floating in a tank that resembles nothing at all. Maybe Australia had been her empty fish tank, once Izzy had gone. Maybe she just had no incentive to swim above the line. And maybe even Prozac — or fluoxetine — wasn't enough to help her rise up. So she was just going to stay there in that flat, with Jojo, and never move until she was made to leave the country.

People—Minnie—might have turned this into “We grew up together,” but it was nothing so proprietary as that she would have claimed. It was the most basic of connections they had, that was all—coming from the same place; ending up here. It was simply that she recognized Philippa. She had known her forever. Knew that there were certain knolls, certain elms and certain oaks along certain roads, certain bends in those roads, certain graveyards and plays of light Philippa had known as well. That’s all she would’ve claimed. If anyone had asked her what growing up there was like in the ’70s and ’80s, she would have said that the overarching principle, which she had been able to see only lately, in reflection, was a randomness. A randomness that had vanished, that this town, with its strivy parents—slotting in the schools and the lessons and the vacations and the camps; this kitchen; gut jobs; chain stores; the Internet—seemed determined to eliminate.

You wanted to die and now you don’t.’ It dawned on Nora that Mrs Elm might be close to having a point, although not quite the whole point. ‘Well, I still think my actual life isn’t worth living. In fact, this experience has just managed to confirm that.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think you think that.’ ‘I do think that. That’s why I said it.’ ‘No. The Book of Regrets is getting lighter. There’s a lot of white space in there now . . . It seems that you have spent all your life saying things that you aren’t really thinking. This is one of your barriers.’ ‘Barriers?

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.

Never underestimate the big importance of small things,’ Mrs Elm

And through the ranks of happy and shouting animals Mrs. Wiggins came slowly forward. There were tears in her eyes when she faced them—good big honest tears, such as only a generous-hearted cow like Mrs. Wiggins can shed. “Well, dear me,” she said, “I must say you animals have gone through a lot to make me your president. So I guess the only thing I can do is to be as good a one as I can. And I expect the thing I’d like you to do best is to just go on doing the things you want to do, as you always have. As for you, John Quincy and X—” She looked up into the elm. “Oh, well, they’ve gone. Just as well, I guess. So now, animals, I thank you. I guess that’s all I’ve got to say.

She took her brother by the arm, and knew there was no explanation she could possibly give. ‘Listen to me, Joe.’ She remembered the anti-philosophy of Mrs Elm in the Midnight Library. ‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.

Sometimes regrets aren't based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just... a load of bullshit

You can choose choices but not outcomes

sampled. So, in time, and with Mrs Elm’s assistance, Nora took lots of books from the shelves, and ended up having a taste of lots of different lives in her search for the right one. She learned that undoing regrets was really a way of making wishes come true. There was almost any life she was living in one universe, after all.

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.

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 at 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.

Mrs Elm had short grey hair and a kind and mildly crinkled oval face sitting pale above her turtle-green polo neck. She was quite old. But she was also the person most on Nora’s wavelength in the entire school, and even on days when it wasn’t raining she would spend her afternoon break in the small library.

My mum died on different dates in different lives. I’d like a life where she is still here. Does that life exist?’ Mrs Elm’s attention switched to Nora. ‘Maybe it does.’ ‘Great.’ ‘But you can’t get there.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because this library is about your decisions. There was no choice you could have made that led to her being alive beyond yesterday. I’m sorry.

Every life she had tried so far since entering the library had really been someone else’s dream. The married life in the pub had been Dan’s dream. The trip to Australia had been Izzy’s dream, and her regret about not going had been a guilt for her best friend more than a sorrow for herself. The dream of her becoming a swimming champion belonged to her father. And okay, so it was true that she had been interested in the Arctic and being a glaciologist when she was younger, but that had been steered quite significantly by her chats with Mrs Elm herself, back in the school library. And The Labyrinths, well, that had always been her brother’s dream.

Never underestimate the big importance of small things,' Mrs. Elm said. 'You must always remember that.

Sometimes to only way to learn is to live

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 .

Maybe there was no perfect life for her, but somewhere, surely, there was a life worth living. And if she was to find a life truly worth living, she realized she would have to cast a wider net. Mrs. Elm was right. The game wasn't over. No player should give up if there were pieces still left on the board.

Look at that chessboard we put back in place", said Mrs Elm, soflty. "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.

Mrs Elm studied Nora hard, as if reading a passage in a book she had read before but had just found it contained a new meaning. ‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.

As she spoke, Mrs Elm’s eyes came alive, twinkling like puddles in moonlight.

Never underestimate the importance of small things,' Mrs Elm said.

Don't worry. Tissues are like lives. There are always more.' Mrs Elm returned to her train of thought. 'Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try...But you are no longer withing a lifetime. You have popped outside. This is your opportunity, Nora, to see how things could be.

She remembered something Mrs Elm had told her in the Midnight Library. ‘You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can’t be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try .

She remembered being enthralled by an article about Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. She’d never seen a place that looked so far away. She’d read about scientists doing research among glaciers and frozen fjords and puffins. Then, prompted by Mrs Elm, she’d decided she wanted to be a glaciologist.

So,’ wondered Mrs Elm, looking at Nora. ‘What are you feeling?’ ‘Like I still want to die. I have wanted to die for quite a while. I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die. In fact, I’m sure it would be a relief. I’m not useful to anyone. I was bad at work. I have disappointed everyone. I am a waste of a carbon footprint, to be honest. I hurt people. I have no one left. Not even poor old Volts, who died because I couldn’t look after a cat properly. I want to die. My life is a disaster. And I want it to end. I am not cut out for living. And there is no point going through all this. Because I am clearly destined to be unhappy in other lives too. That is just me. I add nothing. I am wallowing in self-pity. I want to die.’ Mrs Elm studied Nora hard, as if reading a passage

You can live that life as if you've always been there and the book will never be returned." - Mrs. Elm

Book of Regrets" Every regret you ever had, is recorded here. ~Mrs. Elm

All new future begins at midnight.”~Mrs. Elm

It's between life and death where the shelves go on and a book allows you to try on another life via choices and to undo your regrets.” ~Mrs. Elm

She gestured vaguely along the aisle, towards the distance. "Death is outside." "Well, I should go there. Because I want to die." Nora began walking. But Mrs Elm shook her head. "That isn't how death works." "Why not?" "You don't go to death. Death comes to you.

She remembered the anti-philosophy of Mrs Elm in the Midnight Library. ‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.

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

Never underestimate the big importance of small things, Mrs Elm had said.

Nora let out a deep exhale. 'Dan wasn't like that.' 'People change,' said Mrs. Elm, still looking at the chessboard. Her hand lingered over a bishop. Nora re-thought. 'Or maybe he was like that and I just didn't see it.

Never underestimate the big importance of small things,' Mrs. Elm said. 'You must always remember that.

What if I am dead?' 'Sorry?' 'I mean, in another life. There must be other lives in which I died before today.' Mrs. Elm looked intrigued. 'Isn't that what you wanted?' 'Well, yes, but—' 'You have died an infinite number of times before today, yes. Car accident, drug overdose, drowning, a bout of fatal food poisoning, choking on an apple, choking on a cookie, choking on a vegan hot dog, choking on a non-vegan hot dog, every illness it was possible for you to catch or contract...You have died in every way you can, at any time you could.' 'So, I could open a book and just die?' 'No. Not instantaneously. As with Voltaire, the only lives available here are, well, lives. I mean, you could die in that life, but you won't have died before you enter the life because this Midnight Library is not one of ghosts. It is not a library of corpses. It is a library of possibility. And death is the opposite of possibility. Understand?

So,' wondered Mrs. Elm, look at Nora. 'What are you feeling?' 'Like I still want to die. I have wanted to die for quite a while. I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die. In fact, I'm sure it would be a relief. I'm not useful to anyone. I was bad at work. I have disappointed everyone. I am a waste of a carbon footprint, to be honest. I hurt people. I have no one left. Not even poor old Volts, who died because I couldn't look after a cat properly. I want to die. My life is a disaster. And I want it to end. I am not cut out for living. And there is no point going through all this. Because I am clearly destined to be unhappy in other lives too. That is just me. I add nothing. I am wallowing in self-pity. I want to die.

Mrs. Elm studied Nora hard, as if reading a passage in a book she had read before but had just found it contained a new meaning. 'Want,' she told her, in a measured tone, 'is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.

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.

Think about it. Think about how we start off...as thing set thing. Like the seed of a tree planted in the ground. And then we...we grow...we grow...and at first we are a trunk...' Absolutely nothing. 'But then the tree — the tree that is our life — develops branches. And think of all those branches, departing from the trunk at different heights. And think of all those branches, branching off again, heading in often opposing directions. Think of those branches becoming other branches, and those becoming twigs. And think of the end of each of those twigs, all in different places, having started from the same one. A life is like that, but on a bigger scale. New branches are formed every second of every day. And from our perspective — from everyone's perspective — it feels like a...like a continuum. Each twig has travelled only one journey. But there are still other twigs. And there are also other todays. Other lives that would have been different if you'd taken different directions earlier in your life. This is a tree of life. Lots of religions and mythologies have talked about the tree of life. It's there in Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity. Lots of philosophers and writers have talked about tree metaphors too. For Sylvia Plath, existence was a fig tree and each possible life she could live — the happily-married one, the successful-poet one — was this sweet juicy fig, but she couldn't get to taste the sweet juicy figs and so they just rotted right in front of her. It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don't live. 'For instance, in most of my lives I am not standing at this podium talking to you about success...In most lives I am not an Olympic gold medalist.' She remembered something Mrs. Elm had told her in the Midnight Library. 'You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try...' People were listening now. They clearly needed a Mrs. Elm in their lives. 'The only way to learn is to live.

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.

But you did commit,' said Mrs. Elm, evidently having heard Nora's thoughts. 'And you survived.

You might need to stop worrying about other people's approval, Nora,' Mrs. Elm said in a whisper, for added power and intimacy. 'You don't need a permission slip to be your—

Every life she had tried so far since entering the library had really been someone else's dream. The married life in the pub had been Dan's dream. The trip to Australia had been Izzy's dream, and her regret about not going had been a guilt for her best friend more than a sorrow for herself. The dream of her becoming a swimming champion belonged to her father. And okay, so it was true that she had been interested in the Arctic and being a glaciologist when she was younger, but that had been steered quite significantly by her chats with Mrs. Elm herself, back in the school library. And The Labyrinths, well, that had always been her brother's dream.

Nora thought about being consoled by Mrs. Elm when her dad died. Staying with her, comforting her. It was probably the most kindness anyone had ever shown her.

But what if one day there is no video store?' Nora thought about Mrs. Elm, panicking at the computer, and the flickering lights in the library. 'What if one day you disappear for good? Before you have found a life to settle in?' He shrugged, 'Then I will die. And it means I would have died anyway. In the life I lived before, I kind of like being a slider. I like imperfection. I like keeping death as an option. I like never having to settle.' 'I think my situation is different. I think my death is more imminent. If I don't find a life to live in pretty soon, I think I'll be gone for good.

Life is always an act,' Mrs. Elm said, as they watched her brother being pulled back from the water's edge by his friends. As he then watched a girl whose name she'd long forgotten make an emergency call. 'And you acted when it counted. You swam to that bank. You clawed yourself out. You coughed your guts out and had hypothermia but you crossed the river, against incredible odds. You found something inside you.

I was so stupid, doing that swim, just trying to impress people. I always thought Joe was better than me. I wanted him to like me.' 'Why did you think he was better than you? Because your parents did?' Nora felt angry at Mrs. Elm's directness. But maybe she had a point. 'I always had to do what they wanted me to do in order to impress them. Joe had his issues, obviously. And I didn't really understand those issues until I knew he was gay, but they say sibling rivalry isn't about siblings but parents, and I always felt my parents just encouraged his dreams a bit more.

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.

She heard Mrs. Elm's voice, from under the table somewhere far behind her, cutting through the noise. 'Don't give up! Don't you dare give up, Nora Seed!' She didn't want to die. And she didn't want to live any other life than the one that was hers. The one that could be a messy struggle, but it was her messy struggle. A beautiful messy struggle.

Never underestimate the big importance of small things, Mrs. Elm had said. You must always remember that.

It can be lonely,' Mrs. Elm said. 'Being here. Just sitting. I felt like the game was up. Like a lonely king on a board. You see, I don't know how you remember me, but outside of school I wasn't always the—' She hesitated. 'I've let people down. I haven't always been easy. I've done things I regret. I was a bad wife. Not always a good mother, either. People have given up a little on me, and I don't entirely blame them.

Well, you were kind to me, Mrs....Louise. When I had a hard time at school, you always knew what to say.' Mrs. Elm steadied her breath. 'Thank you, Nora.' 'And you're not alone on the board now. A pawn has come and joined you.' 'You were never a pawn.

Mrs. Elm's eyes sparkled with sudden life. 'Well, that's the beauty, isn't it? You just never know how it ends.' And Nora smiled as she stared at all the pieces she still had left in play, thinking about her next move.

She started to write. Nora wanted to live. Once she'd finished the inscription she waited a moment. Frustratingly, nothing happened, and she remembered what Mrs. Elm had once said. Want is an interesting word. It means lack. So, she crossed that out and tried again. Nora decided to live. Nothing. She tried again. Nora was ready to live. Still nothing, even when she underlined the word 'live'. Everywhere now, there was breakage and ruination. The ceiling was falling, razing everything, smothering each of the bookshelves into piles of dust. She gaped over and saw the figure of Mrs. Elm, out from under the desk where she had been sheltering Nora, standing there without any fear at all then disappearing completely as the roof caved in almost everywhere, smothering remnants of fire and shelf stacks and all else.

Nora walked through the haze of dust and smoke in the direction Mrs. Elm had pointed towards, as the ceiling continued to fall. It was hard to breathe, and to see, but she had just about managed to keep count of the aisles. Sparks from the lights fell onto her head. The dust stuck in her throat, nearly causing her to vomit. But even in the powdery fog she could see that most of the books were now ablaze. In fact, none of the shelves of books seemed intact, and the heat felt like a force. Some of the earliest shelves and books to set on fire were now nothing but ash.

I don't want to die,' said Nora, her voice suddenly raised but also fragile. She was shaking from her very core. 'I don't want to die.' Mrs. Elm looked at her with wide eyes. Eyes shining with the small flame of an idea. 'You need to get out of here.

Driving back to Cambridge cocooned in her expensive Audi, smelling almost nauseatingly of vinyl and plastic and other synthetic materials, weaving through busy traffic, the cars sliding by like forgotten lives, she was deeply wishing she had been able to see Mrs. Elm, the real one, before she had died. It would have been good to have one last game of chess with her before she passed away. And she thought of poor Leo, sat in a small windowless cell at a Bedford police station, waiting for Doreen to come and collect him. 'This is the best life,' she told herself, a little desperate now. 'This is the best life. I am staying here. This is the life for me. This is the best life. This is the best life.' But she knew she didn't have long.

Mrs. Elm returned to her train of thought. 'Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try...But you are no longer within a lifetime. You have popped outside. This is your opportunity, Nora, to see how things could be.

The thing is, I don't know what I regret any more." 'Okay, well, let's see. You say that I am just a perception. Then why did you perceive me? Why am I — Mrs. Elm — the person you see?" 'I don't know. Because you were someone I trusted. You were kind to me.

You’re going to win this,’ Nora observed. Mrs Elm’s eyes sparkled with sudden life. ‘Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.’ And Nora smiled as she stared at all the pieces she still had left in play, thinking about her next move.