Page 232 - The Midnight Library

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more she relaxed into it, the more things came to her.

Nora also loved spending time with Molly.
e cosy anarchy of her playing in her bedroom, or the delicate bonding
that happened at stor y time, reading the simple magical brilliance of e
Tiger Who Came to Tea, or hanging out in the garden.

‘Watch me, Mummy,’ said Molly, as she pedalled away on her tricycle one
Saturday morning. ‘Mummy, look! Are you watching?’
‘ at’s ver y good, Molly. Good pedalling.’
‘Mummy, look! Zoomy!’

‘Go, Molly!’
But then the front wheel of the tricycle slipped off the lawn and down into
the flowerbed. Molly fell off and knocked her head hard on a small rock.
Nora rushed over and picked her up and had a look at her. Molly was clearly

hurt, with a scrape on her forehead, the skin grazed and bleeding, but she
didn’t want to show it even as her chin wobbled.
‘I’m all right,’ she said slowly, in a voice as fragile as porcelain. ‘I’m all
right. I’m all right. I’m all right. I’m all right.’ Each ‘all right’ got progressively

closer to tears, then horse-shoed back around to calm again. For all her
nocturnal fears about bears, she had a resilience to her that Nora couldn’t
help but admire and be inspired by. is little human being had come from
her, was in some way a part of her, and if she had hidden strength then

maybe Nora did too.
Nora hugged her. ‘It’s all right, baby . . . My brave girl. It’s okay. How does
it feel now, darling?’
‘It’s okay. It’s like on holiday.’

‘On holiday?’
‘Yes, Mummy . . .’ she said, a little upset Nora couldn’t remember. ‘ e
slide.’
‘Oh yes, of course. e slide. Yes. Silly me. Silly Mummy.’

Nora felt something inside her all at once. A kind of fear, as real as the
fear she had felt on the Arctic skerr y, face to face with the polar bear.
A fear of what she was feeling.
Love.

You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in ever y sensual
pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people,
you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the