Usually when she wakes in the mornings, she can remember only snippets of dreams she might have had. But this time, the image of the 1920s house in New York, the man on stage meeting her gaze as he sang, will not leave her. In fact, like with the dreams of the 1950s, this one only seems to get firmer in her mind as the day progresses, little snippets coming to her out of nowhere as she tries to concentrate on her job. The exact texture of the champagne bubbles on her tongue. The feel of her dress against her skin. The tenor of his voice.
At 5 p.m. on the dot, she pours herself a glass of wine – who cares if it’s early – and gives up on the proposal she is working on. She moves from her kitchen table to the sofa and brings up Google. Then she stops, her fingers hovering over her laptop keyboard, realising she has no idea where she’s going with this.
She takes a sip of wine, tapping her index finger on the glass before setting it down again. She starts to type:Dreams of the 1920s.
It comes up with a revision site for schoolkids about the American Dream in the jazz age as well as various unhelpful-looking pages. But then what was she expecting exactly? She takes another sip of wine, then rolls her shoulders.Okay, Lissa.What is she looking for here?
She triesMemories of the 1920s and 1950s. Because that’s what they feel like, isn’t it? Despite the fact that it makes no sense, when she’s lost in one of these dreams, it feels familiar, like she’s looking back on an event she’d nearly forgotten, only to be reminded when someone tells a story about it.
The search results are still completely irrelevant, mostly centring around how other people remember those times.
She spends a solid twenty minutes – during which she gets herself a second glass of wine – going down a Google rabbit hole. Only then does she find something that gives her pause, after googling the more vague ‘memories of another life’.
Past life regression.
Past lives. Is that what this is? Ridiculous, surely. Even so, she clicks on it.A method that uses hypnosis to recover what practitioners believe are memories of past lives or incarnations.Well, she doesn’t need hypnosis, does she? It seems to be happening of its own accord, apparently apropos of nothing.
She stares at the two salient words.Past lives.Lives, plural. Is it really possible? That she once lived in the 1920s and 1950s, and that for some reason these memories are coming back to … well, not exactly haunt her, butremindher?
She continues to click through the search results, scrolling over blog posts about how past life regression changed the writer’s life, and a therapist’s page offering both regular and ‘regression’ hypnotherapy. She takes another sip of wine – she can already feel it going to her head – and then types out one more search.
Help with past lives – Bath.
And there at the top of the results is the page of a ‘spiritual counsellor’ who claims to be clairvoyant and offers a holistic approach that includes tarot reading and past life regression as well as regular therapy – a jack of all trades, apparently. Saskia Arthur is her name. Lissa clicks to her photo to see a woman in her fifties, with light grey hair and a big smile. There’s nothing about her that immediately screams a mystical, all-knowing energy, but maybe you have to meet her in person.
She’s on the verge of sending an enquiry through when she stops herself. What the hell is shedoing? The woman is likely a con artist. Lissa doesn’t believe in tarot reading, for God’s sake. She does not need to sit in some randomer’s house listening to her tell her that good fortune is on its way, or try to impose a meaning onto these dreams that does not exist. She is not that desperate. It’s the wine making her stupid, that’s all.
She’d be better off trying to put the dreams out of her mind and focusing on her present, especially after what Mia said to her at the pub. It’s probably nothing – an overactive subconscious. There is no way that a version of her soul once lived in 1920s New York – it’s probably just because she fancied Leo inThe Great Gatsbyfor a while.
And after finishing her second glass of wine, she’s almost convinced herself of that. Almost.
Chapter Eight
There is a light drizzle hitting the windscreen as Lissa drives west out of Bath – an annoying amount of rain because neither the slow nor the fast wiper setting is quite right, so she has to keep changing it every couple of minutes. She clicks the indicator as her sat nav tells her to turn right, past an old stone wall covered in ivy.
She’s fifteen minutes away from the restaurant Mark insisted they try, just north of Farmborough, when her phone rings. Mark’s voice comes through the Bluetooth speakers as she drives under a canopy of trees, their old, twisted branches knotted and bare.
‘Lissa, I’m so sorry, I’m running late.’
‘Oh. That’s okay. How long will you be? I’m halfway there.’
‘I’m still at work. I got held up.’
She resists the urge to point out that she too was at work today – admittedly working from home rather than in the office like him – but that she managed to leave on time. ‘So you haven’t left yet?’
‘No. I’m sorry, I’ve still got a few more things to do.’
‘Oh,’ she says again. He’ll be ages then. She’s not really sure what can possibly be that urgent – she knows he’s working on a pitch for a new client, but thought that was basically done. Then again, she doesn’t understand why he bothers to go to the office on days when he doesn’t have to, either, so perhaps she’s missing something here.
‘So do you want me to turn around, or …?’
‘Ah …’ There’s a hesitation, and she swears she can hear the click of the keyboard at his end. ‘Well, you’re already on your way, right?’
‘Yes,’ she says slowly.
More clicking. ‘I know this is a bit weird to ask, but whereabouts exactly are you?’
‘On the A39,’ she says in the same slow voice, because she’s not sure what is inherently weird about that.
