Miss Graham’s Last Lesson
Miss Graham’s Last Lesson
A little later, he was alone in the carriage. Or he thought he was. But then he heard a smoker’s cough and looked away from the window to see the ghost of a woman. Not Agnes, but still someone familiar.
Miss Graham, who was sat near the end of the carriage, leaning against the green velvet seat.
‘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 genuinely interested.’
‘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 clear you had 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 about the 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.’
‘Seven hundred?’
‘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 quote Macbeth. But my guess is yes. We linger longer on the stuff that shaped us. As in life.’
‘Right, I see.’
‘Now, Agnes tells you to get on the train and to not mess things up. Your choices have all been made. This is Act 5, Scene 5. Et cetera, et cetera. And this is wise advice. Because if you mess things up you lose eternity. You lose your chance to see Maggie and everyone again … But all I will say is that sometimes life is the most important thing. Seeing Maggie for all eternity as a ghost is not the same as sitting next to her for a single day on Earth.’
‘Why?’
‘Warmth, touch, presence, shared air. It’s the difference between the voice and an echo. You could hear the echo of a song for all time, but it would never beat hearing the song …’
‘Right, but—’
‘And to live life well you need to know when to ignore what is expected of you. Even if it means breaking the rules.’
Suddenly, and seemingly from nowhere, there was Agnes standing over them, straightening her hat as if ready for business. ‘That’s quite enough of that.’
Miss Graham took another inhale of her eternal cigarette. ‘I get the hint.’ And she exhaled a cloud of smoke, behind which she disappeared.
Agnes sat down in the now empty seat, looked down at her lap and smoothed a crease out of her skirt.
‘She really shouldn’t have been here. And you must ignore her radical ideas.
She was always in the shop, you know, telling me to stock more communists and miserable French radical theorists.
I always told her life is too fragile to deconstruct it all the time.
Rules may look boring, but they are there in every novel and painting.
They keep things whole. And Miss Graham, well, she found it easy to dismantle … ’
‘I always liked her,’ said the Ghost, feeling a flicker of bravery in his disagreement.
Agnes sighed. ‘Well, yes. She was quite charming, I suppose. But think about it … she didn’t opt to become your life guide, did she? No. That was me.’
‘Something I still don’t understand. Why you wanted to help me.’
‘I remembered how you used to come into the shop. So hungry for books. And yet you still turned down the offer of me buying you one. I always remembered that. So I thought this was my chance. To give you a story. Metaphorically speaking.’
‘Well, thank you.’
‘But you are going to have to see the glass as half full. Because that way, when you reach the end of the line, everything will be fine. Eternity is good. I mean, it isn’t life, but J.M.
Barrie was right, actually. It’s an awfully big adventure, death.
It’s not like this. There is no rush, no timeframe, no fleeting conversations on a train.
There are no lessons to learn. Think of the train as the question and the destination as the answer.
And the answer is always the feeling you have about your life at the end of the journey.
’ She smiled encouragingly and patted his knee.
‘So … best get on with it, eh, Old Bean?’
Wilbur looked out of the window and saw himself walking past a newsstand for the Daily Mirror. He caught sight of the front page: CASSIUS CLAY NEW BOXING CHAMP!
The night was there as well as the day. All in the same sky. Blurring together and intertwining like an abstract painting.
A little further along, his mother was walking down the street carrying some meat from the butcher, with a face on the edge of tears, only forcing a smile as she saw Wilbur leaving the house.
It was getting closer …
Out of the window he saw Dougie arriving home from prison. Then he saw two tickets to the concert lying on the table that had once been a bomb shelter.
He was very nearly there, at the night that changed everything …
The train was slowing towards somewhere he knew he didn’t want to revisit.
‘I don’t want to stop here. Agnes, really, I don’t want to stop here!’
It was too late. ‘The train is stopping. And it isn’t going anywhere until you get off.’
The train gently stopped, but Wilbur – or the Ghost – was feeling more rebellious after the chat with Miss Graham.
‘That’s okay. I will just stay here. On this carriage. I have all the time in the world.’