Quotation
This comes from the 1888 romantic comedy play Sweet Lavender by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. This play was hugely successful in its time, running for many performances and wowing audiences around the world. Today the play is mostly remembered for this quote, which has such a British vibe to it. And of course, fits in with the overall message of hope in Between Life and Life.

The Recovery Room
Noel initially takes Julian to the Recovery Room at the Hall of Mirrors, where people can take time to work through the intense grief they experience when looking into the Mirror at their loved ones on Earth.

The room is painted pale pink, a comforting, healing colour, and has soft, thick carpets and furniture. It is in fact rather womb-like. Matilda doesn't seem to offer people any sort of psychological therapy; they are more or less left to get over it in their own time, with the help of warm blankets, copious tissues, and of course, mugs of tea! The healing nature of the Waystation itself is probably sufficient to bring people back to equilibrium in an hour or two.

Noel doesn't think this lachrymose environment will help Julian at all, and Matilda seems to agree that exercise and fresh air would actually be better, wishing that more people would try it. Apparently the people crying in the Recovery Room are there from choice, or feel too terrible to go outside for a walk.

I was never happy with this scene and couldn't work out why until obliviablack pointed out I'd switched POV and started describing everything from Noel's perspective. Once I realised that and fixed it up, it worked much better. That's why the chapter is dedicated to her!

Mercury Street
The Hall of Mirrors is on Mercury Street because mirrors used to be backed with a mixture of silver and mercury (my head canon is that the Hall of Mirrors lies between Mercury Street and Silver Street). The mirrors were very expensive and good quality, but unfortunately toxic, leading to many deaths in the manufacturing process. That's why it's not used any more.

I got this idea from Hell is an Empty Heart by AnnamitaMuscaria, where she also links the god Hermes (Mercury) with mercury and mirrors in one scene. I also figure a lot of the streets at the Waystation are named after gods, planets, and chemical elements.

I looked up Mercury Street on Google Maps, and was barely surprised to discover it was the street my husband was born on. I never knew this before. Why do you mock me, street directory????

Love Avenue
The reason for this avenue's name becomes apparent later in the story, as do the red roses which appropriately run along it. My primary school was on Love Street, by the way. It had a bed of red roses out the front.

A Levels
In the story, Julian's sister Emma is preparing for her A Level exams at sixth form college, so must be around 17 or 18. That makes her about six years younger than Julian. I'm not sure of the age gap between Julian and his sister in real life, but I'm pretty sure it is smaller than that (although she does have a youthful appearance which makes it plausible for the story).

Soulmates Tea Room
This charming tea room with the blue awning and double heart logo is inspired by the many cafés I took refuge in while briefly living in the Latin Quarter of Paris. They all seemed to have the teeny tiny marble top tables and the banquettes along one wall, where I curled up with old paperbacks I'd bought from nearby second hand bookshops, and drank endless cups of herbal tea.

I had a very specific image of a café in my head which, to my annoyance, I could neither find a picture of, nor persuade the AI to make me an illustration of. It was pale blue with a dark blue awning, and above it was an old-fashioned apartment with an ironwork Juliet balcony covered in flowers, and casement windows with white trim and those wooden shutters like little doors (called volets).

The AI struggled with this and did the best that it could, but as you can see, it is not on a corner, as in the story.

Chocolate Cake with Strawberries and Peppermint Tea
Chocolate is a symbol of romantic love, and strawberries of erotic passion. (Is the triple-choc cake a symbol of love on three levels – heart body, and soul?).

Peppermint is sacred to Venus, and is said to be a plant of passionate love. It is supposed to clear the mind and allow you to live fully in the present moment, which Noel seems to do very well in this chapter. Noel does actually drink peppermint tea in real life (at least sometimes).

Noel's Past Lives
These are mostly based on roles that Noel has played in film and television. Julian jokingly asks if Noel was Cleopatra or Napoleon, because these are stereotypical joke past lives to have – but I think Noel actually would be good as both these historical characters!

The highwayman – It was announced more than a year ago that Noel was going to play Dick Turpin in a comedy-adventure series for Apple TV. Coincidentally (I presume), about a year before that I published a story online about Noel as a hot celebrity highwayman in the 18th century. Dick Turpin was mentioned in the story.

Noel says his past life was like an Adam Ant music video, referring to the 1981 song "Stand and Deliver" by Adam & The Ants. Noel was a big fan of Adam Ant when he was a kid, and later on they became friends.

https://youtu.be/XiYxBSk79tA

The rich lady – An imaginary situation which sounds suspiciously like a the plot of a Regency romance. I thought of Julian as the penniless musician, and Noel the great lady secretly in love with him.

The dancing girl – Based on the time Noel took part in the charity event Let's Dance for Comic Relief on the BBC in 2011. He performed the 1978 song "Wuthering Heights" as Kate Bush in a long red dress (Julian made a swoony appearance at the end in a Heathcliff type role). Kate Bush danced in a leotard waving scarves about in her music videos, so I imagined Noel in some sort of desert souk doing a Dance of the Seven Veils.

https://youtu.be/S_02JooS40Q

The child prostitute – Inspired by Noel's performance of Dickie in the 2015 film, Set the Thames on Fire, where he plays an adult prostitute who dresses like a child. Although the film is set in a dystopian future London, it looks very neo-Victorian. (No photo in case it gives you nightmares). 

Prostitution was legal in late Victorian times over the age of 13; boys and girls of 11 and 12 who could pass for 13 were routinely sold into prostitution by their parents. Past Life Noel looking like a teenager or even younger is heartbreakingly believable in this situation.

Noel says that although he was never forced into prostitution in his current life, he had some dodgy experiences with adults in his childhood. This is (as far as I know) fictional, made up for the story in order to fit in with the past life.

The starving artist – This was my genuine attempt to look at Noel's life and try and imagine what the life he had just before this one might be like. Basically it was looking at patterns in his life, and imagining how they might have been set in motion by the events of a previous life.

His ambition to be an artist was formed at the age of 12 after seeing a Salvador Dali painting called The Burning Giraffe, so I imagined his previous self as an artist who was a contemporary of Dali, but never gained success. Noel maintained his interest in the Paris art scene of the 1920s and '30s, and studied commercial art and graphic design, which could be seen as a follow on from being forced to paint advertising pictures to survive. He is known for being a picky and sparing eater as well, which seemed to fit in with the starving artist motif.

You can see the (imagined) frustrated artistic ambitions of his previous life being fulfilled in Noel's current life, as he is a professional artist who exhibits regularly, sells for hundreds of pounds, and has been featured by major art galleries and museums.

Apart from the long-ago dancing girl, the most recent four lifetimes from the 18th century to the 20th century do work out mathematically and don't overlap. It requires the Victorian child prostitute to have a short lifespan, but unfortunately that is by no means implausible. The artist would have been born in the early 1900s, and must have died in the early 1970s, when Noel was born.

Noel's Cake Shop Experiences
The story about Noel getting sacked on his first day working at a cake shop when he was 14 is 100% true! The boss came back and threw a fit when they discovered Noel lying on the floor eating cake. It's somehow apt that he became the host of The Great British Bake Off, as if he had to pay for his earlier actions ...

The café that Noel plans to open at the Waystation one day, filled with artwork, is vaguely based on Maison Bertaux in Soho. This famous London patisserie was established in 1871 by Monsieur Bertaux, a Communard fleeing Paris. It has an art gallery upstairs where Noel has had an exhibition.

(It's got the pale blue apartment I imagined, minus the balcony and shutters, and is another influence on the Soulmates Tea Room).

The Soulmate Lockout
At the end of the chapter, Julian and Noel discover the Soulmates Tea Room will only allow soulmates into it – which is how they discover they are soulmates. The mysterious mechanism which allows this to occur gave me some trouble.

Spell was too magical, blessing too religious. Wards, runes, and sigils were considered, but seemed like things that would need some level of explanation, which would slow down the plot and lessen the impact of the reveal.

Then I remembered the wonderful vagueness of the English language. How would Pete, an ordinary worker at the Waystation, refer to it when in a hurry? It could only be a "thingummy"! So that's how the door keeps non-soulmates out. (But in case you were wondering, I was picturing a ward, rune or sigil of some kind).

Characters
Pete and Viv
The owners of the Soulmates Tea Room are named after the main characters in the film Withnail and I – their names are reputedly Peter Marwood and Vivian Withnail (you can see Marwood's name on a telegram he receives, and Withnail is based on Bruce Robinson's friend, the actor Vivian MacKerrell). I have based their appearance vaguely on the actors who play them in the film – Paul McGann and Richard E. Grant.