Chapter 1
The Violin
It was ringing midnight as they eventually reached the open vastness of the Piazza San Marco, street lamps on every side, the square in the middle enveloped in golden light, the bell in the basilica throwing its dancing vibrations all the way to the stars.
‘Listen, Maggie, I want you to tell me if I start to lose this me. This one right here. Make sure I never sack poor old Charlie.’
‘Why would you sack Charlie? He’s been brilliant. And he loves you.’
‘I know. I know. But the future can do things.’ He thought of something else. ‘And Mam … I know she’s not always easy. But you are right, I should be gentler with her. We should probably have her round on Sundays. Not just once in a blue moon.’
Maggie smiled and squeezed his arm. ‘Well, she’s always lovely to me. So that sounds like a good plan.’
And Wilbur nodded, as if realising it for the first time. ‘She is lovely to you. Yes.’
Just a short walk away, a busker was playing Verdi on a violin outside the Caffè Florian. Wilbur and Maggie joined the small late-night crowd at the back. Maggie took a photograph, then grinned and nestled into Wilbur’s shoulder.
‘Aren’t you worried?’ she asked. ‘About turning all that money down?’
‘No,’ said Wilbur.
‘But what if you regret it?’
‘I won’t. I promise.’
‘You don’t know the future.’
And she was right. He had known one future, of course.
But that was just one in a whole infinite multiverse of them.
Now he was heading into a different future.
A different version of the world. One which, like all of them, would contain pain and happiness.
But he wasn’t going to run away from any of it.
He smiled because he had an answer for her. ‘The only way to learn is to live.’
‘Where did you get that from?’
‘From someone who isn’t even born yet.’
She laughed, more in love with him than she had ever been.
‘But let’s just live,’ he said, and then he had a different thought.
Or maybe the same thought, widening out.
He remembered seeing an older version of himself staring wearily at projected growth forecasts.
‘Right now it’s warm. And it’s Venice. And we’ve just drunk the most wonderful white wine and eaten food we’d never heard of before tonight. And we are listening to a violin.’
‘This is true. This is almost as good as a bench in Endcliffe Park.’
‘Almost.’
‘Almost.’
He found a hundred lira coin in his pocket and went over and gladly flipped it into the air and into the violin case.
‘Grazie mille,’ said the musician.
It felt good to pay his respect. To attend to the wonder of the world around him. He was never going to stop being this man, he decided, as the coin landed face-side up.
‘So,’ he asked her after the music stopped, ‘what shall we do tomorrow?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, her voice as calm as the benign night sky above them. ‘Shall we just make it up as we go along?’
They held hands and started walking back to the hotel. And as they walked Wilbur had a sense of the true nature of time. Of strands of life plaiting over each other, past and present and future, keeping everything that had ever happened as fresh and real as everything that ever will.
‘Yes,’ he said softly, as if it was the wisest philosophy he had ever heard. One that could guide them through their entire lives. ‘Let’s make it up as we go along.’