Page 20 of Love and Other Paradoxes

“‘Her tongue, a dart, a star, a’—shit.”

The final rehearsal wasn’t going well.

Diana broke off for the fifth time in five lines. “This isn’t working. It’s flat. Isn’t it? It’s flat, and boring, and it’s

going to send the audience to sleep . Fuck. Joseph, why am I making such a hash of this?”

“It’s not you.” He tried to think of what he’d say if he didn’t know the future. “Maybe it’s the poem.”

“It’s not the poem, you idiot genius. And it’s not me. I’m wonderful. It’s something between the poem and me.” She waved her

hand airily back and forth. “I’m not connecting with it. There’s something missing.”

He tried to restrain his panic. “You’re having this revelation a day before the event?”

“Better a day before than a day after.” She paced across the room. “We need to shake things up.” She whirled on him, grabbing

his arms. “Let’s go punting!”

He stared at her. “It’s February.”

“You’re Scottish.” She let him go and headed out of the door.

He followed her onto Trinity Street, trying not to think about where fate might be manoeuvring them. They were just two people, going on a spontaneous, completely insane boat trip. He registered Vera at the corner of his eye, but he refused to look at her. No time travellers today, no future. Just him and Diana.

She took him to the supermarket, where she bought a punnet of strawberries, a bottle of gin, and a pack of paper cups. Then

she marched him down to the river, where she negotiated a discount self-hire punt simply by raising her eyebrow. When the

overawed employee had shown them to their boat, she settled back on the cushions like a queen.

He laughed at her from the dock. “Oh, so I’m driving?”

She looked at him over her sunglasses. “If you’d rather, I’m happy to send us round in circles.”

“You’ve been at Cambridge two and a half years, and you haven’t learned how to punt?”

“I’ve had better things to do.”

“That’s convenient.” He took the pole and stepped onto the rocking platform. He hadn’t done much punting, but he had overheard

enough of Rob’s rants about technique to absorb the basics. Keep the pole close to the boat. Drop it straight down, not at an angle. And finally, and most importantly, If the pole gets stuck, let it go . He lifted it hand over hand and dropped it, steering them smoothly out from the dock.

“Very nice, Joseph,” she drawled with an approving smile. “A man of many talents.”

“Poetry and punting. At this rate, I’ll be rich enough to retire by forty.”

She laughed appreciatively. She slopped gin into a paper cup and raised it. “To being carried away in boats by strange men.”

Her tone was undeniably flirtatious. He could laugh it off, but he had learned enough about Diana to know that his natural reac tion was rarely right. He needed to confront her, see her bet and raise it. “How does Crispin feel about you getting carried away in boats by strange men?”

With her sunglasses on, he couldn’t tell where she was looking. “He adores me,” she said as they drifted under the low arch

of Silver Street Bridge. “Nothing can change that.”

Joe tried to maintain a stoic, manly pose, which was tricky when he had to bend almost double to avoid losing his head. “He

doesn’t act like he adores you.”

She scoffed. “Crispin doesn’t act like he adores anything. He’s basically incapable of any external expression of emotion.

But he still has feelings. They’re just—buried, under a deep layer of trauma and manly nonsense.”

“Wow.” He straightened up as they emerged into the pale sunshine. “He sounds like a real catch.”

“Very funny.” She took off her sunglasses, draping her arm picturesquely along the side of the boat. “But the point is, Crisp’s

not a bad person. He’s just—broken. His parents shipped him off to boarding school when he was eight years old. It’s no wonder

he can never really be vulnerable in front of anyone.” Her eyes darted up, and he felt the tingling shock of her attention.

“And before you say it—no, I didn’t board, but my parents were so emotionally absent it might actually have been easier if

I had. At least that would have been consistent.” A laugh, brittle as lightning. He thought of the dazzling vacancy of her

parents’ house in London, a little girl sitting alone in all that empty splendour. “Neither of us has ever really known love,”

she mused softly. “So we perform our version of it for each other.”

He let the pole trail in the water, the wooden crossbeams of the Mathematical Bridge receding behind them. “You’re saying

you’re both broken in the same way.”

“You and your way with words.” She glanced up at him fondly. “But yes. Maybe that’s not enough for a relationship, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Is it?” He steered them on past Queens’, the wind sending the boat briefly astray. “Wouldn’t you rather be on your own than

with someone who can’t be himself around you?”

Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Nice idea. But that’s not going to work.”

“Why not?”

“I need to be adored.” She stared across the empty lawn of King’s, fingers clenching unconsciously on her cup. “It’s not something

I’m proud of. But it’s a fact. It’s as if part of me is afraid I won’t exist if no one is looking.” She took a sip of gin,

wincing. “I suspect that’s the reason I act. Why else would I feel the need to seek the admiration of complete strangers?

I was deprived of affection in childhood, so I seek it out elsewhere. Insatiably. Pathologically.” She shrugged. “Simple cause

and effect.”

They drifted towards the triple arches of Clare Bridge. He steered left, laughing under his breath.

She eyed him mistrustfully. “What?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Just—do you really think you can explain yourself like that?”

“Oh yes.” Her face was deadly serious. “There’s always an explanation for people like us.”

“Us?”

“Us.” She gestured back and forth between them. “You’re not immune, Joseph. You have another form of the same disease. Pouring

your heart out on paper and offering it up to strangers isn’t normal behaviour. Just like my compulsion to be admired. You

can always trace it back to something. Usually in early childhood.”

He felt himself adopting a defensive curl. “Speak for yourself. My parents are great.”

“Well, bully for you.” She raised her cup in a sarcastic toast. “But mark my words, there’ll be something. Some way they failed

you that you’re not even conscious of.”

Without wanting to think about it, he thought about it. It was easy enough to play her game, point to small moments in his

past and diagnose them as the source of something greater. The way his dad had laughed when he’d first said he wanted to be

a poet. The poem his mum had hung like an in-joke on the bathroom wall. All the little ways they had undermined his ambition

in the hope of shielding him from ridicule, or themselves from disappointment. But he didn’t want to think like that, turning

well-intentioned care into damage. “Can’t think of a single thing,” he said breezily.

She crossed her arms. “Really. You’re telling me your dad’s not a classic dour, borderline-alcoholic, perpetually disapproving

Scot?”

“ Dour rhymes with sure , not shower .” He looked past her down the river. “And no. He’s not even a Scot.”

“Oh?” she said with a flicker of interest. “What is he?”

“English.”

He regretted telling her as soon as he saw her eyes widen. “Aha! There it is.”

He shoved the pole against the riverbed. “There what is?”

“The explanation.” She clasped her hands. “An outsider in your own home, marked out as different, never truly belonging. Bullied

and excluded, you—”

“Why do you assume I was bullied?”

She snorted. “Please, Joseph. You project wounded puppy to a distance of a hundred metres.” She dunked a strawberry in her cup, sucked the gin out of it, then ate it. “So,” she continued, licking juice off her fingers. “You were bullied. Which completely torpedoed your self-esteem. Then—let me guess. A teacher took an interest in your poetry, encouraged you? And you achieved some big external milestone, something that finally made you feel like you existed?”

He remembered: the envelope, the foiled certificate, the giddy, disconnected joy, like he had discovered a door leading out

of himself into a bright golden world beyond. “I won a national poetry contest,” he said miserably.

“QED,” she said, and took a sip of gin. “The rest is history. Or it will be, someday.”

He should have been focusing on the breeze dancing in her hair, the rosy undertones of her porcelain skin, the way her eyes

picked up the hint of green in the water. But he was annoyed, not so much by what she was saying as by her obvious delight

in finding what she thought was the key to him. He didn’t like the feeling of being made into a puzzle box for her amusement.

“But that can’t be all there is to it. I was already writing poetry before any of that. It’s been part of who I am since forever.”

“But you probably didn’t feel the need to impress anyone with it until life put a hole in your heart.” She shivered, turning

towards the golden cloisters of the Wren Library. Inside, Byron lounged on his shattered temple, the human being he once was

perfected into marble. “There’s no help for it, Joseph. Artists aren’t people. We look like people, and we can sometimes pretend

to be people, but any chance of actually being people was burned out of us long ago.”

He was almost sure he disagreed. But her words had a terrible pull. She made not being a person sound so wonderful: a tragic, glamorous calling, inevitable for both of them from the moment they were born. And wasn’t that what he had always wanted: to be more than he was, to escape the daily mess and awkwardness and humiliation of being himself?

The immaculate grass of St. John’s Meadow spread out to their left, the eagle on the gate staring fiercely in their direction.

Diana stood up, setting the boat rocking. “My turn,” she announced.

He adjusted his stance to steady himself. “I thought you were too busy and important to learn punting.”

“That remains the case. But, much as I was enjoying the view—I’m getting cold.” She lurched elegantly down the boat. He offered

his hand, and she took it, stepping up until they were sharing the narrow platform. She clutched at him to steady herself,

and before he knew what was happening, they were twined together, her leg sliding between his, her hand cold on the back of

his neck. With a strange hunger, she said, “You’ve known it, haven’t you? Love. Or something like it.”

His heart thundered with a peculiar mixture of excitement and apprehension. This was it. The moment— No. No narrator. If this was happening, he was making it happen. He leaned in, close, closer—

Diana drew back, a smile in her sharp green eyes. “Who is she?”

The question sent him into a panic he didn’t understand. His mind screamed with obscuring static. “Who?”

“The girl you wrote ‘A Taste of Stars’ about. The girl you were kissing.” She looked at him under her eyelashes. “More than

kissing. We all know what you were doing putting come at the end of a line, after all that buildup.”

He felt himself blush. He had read the poem a hundred times, but he had never really understood it until he had heard her perform it: the line breaks breathless, the rhythm urgent in a way that had invaded his dreams.

She was enjoying his discomfort. “So?” She pressed herself into him, gimlet eyes and warm juniper breath, and he was undone

by the nearness of her. You , he thought. She’s going to be you.

But he could never tell her that. The realisation broke the moment. “That’s between me and her.” He handed her the pole and

sat down.

She was watching him with a strange, thoughtful expression. He laughed, pouring gin into a cup to cover his self-consciousness.

“What?”

“Remember what I said about you not being my type?” She hauled the pole out of the water at an angle that would have made

Rob weep. “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

It was hardly a declaration of love. But it still made him feel like she had given him something precious, foiled and inked

and marking him out as chosen. He settled back against the cushions with a smile he found it difficult to hide.

As he did, a figure on the riverbank caught his eye. Vera. She was alone, watching them from the grass, a look of alarm on

her face.

“Right. Here goes.” Diana dug in the pole, setting the boat spinning. Vera lurched out of sight. By the time they were pointing

in the right direction again, she was gone.

The sight of her had shaken him. He would have found it hard to forget. But Diana’s punting was so terrible that he couldn’t concentrate on anything else. He sipped neat gin for courage as she steered them unerringly in circles, crashed into the bank, then another boat, then narrowly avoided braining herself on the Bridge of Sighs. He was consumed with secondhand embarrassment, but it was clear she didn’t care. She rode each misadventure with blithe unconcern, tossing her hair with a smile, pivoting into a flawless impression of a punt guide that made him laugh so hard he got gin up his nose. By the time they were zigzagging towards Magdalene Bridge, he was both mildly drunk and also, impossibly, enjoying himself.

Diana launched the punt diagonally across the river, prompting one of the professional guides to swear under his breath and

change course. Joe felt something pulling their boat back. “What’s happening?”

“The pole’s stuck. As the actress said to the bishop,” she said with a dirty chuckle.

He laughed, less at the joke than at her exaggerated amusement. She winked cheekily and half turned, making an ineffectual

effort to tug the pole free. The boat was still moving forward, and she was leaning farther and farther back. Rob’s third

rule of punting pushed its way into Joe’s tipsy brain.

“Diana,” he said, sitting up. “Let go of the pole. Let go—”

She didn’t let go. He watched, helpless, as the boat went one way and the pole went another, and Diana followed the latter

into the cold grey water.

She surfaced with a shriek, arms flailing. “Fuck! Fucking fuck that’s cold. Oh Jesus fucking Christ.” A tour boat drifted past, a little girl watching in fascination as her dad clapped

his hands over her ears.

“Hold on,” said Joe. “I’m coming.” He tried to use the paddle to row the boat towards her, but it was like trying to steer a bus by blowing on it. He leaned out, grabbing the floating pole and swinging it out towards her. She clutched the end and he pulled her in, reaching into the freezing water to help her clamber into the punt. She crouched, dripping, on the wooden slats, hair plastered across her forehead, as far from the polished, perfect actress on the cover of Meant to Be as he had ever seen her.

“I told you to let go of the pole,” he said.

Diana was convulsing. He thought for a terrifying second that she’d gone into shock. Then she took in a shaky breath, and

he realised she was laughing.

“As the bishop said to the actress,” she gasped, then rolled onto her back, drenched and hysterical, eyes squeezed shut against

the grey winter sky. He had never seen her like this, all awareness of herself gone, given up entirely to what she was feeling.

He felt a lurching swoop, less a sensation than a premonition: this was the woman he was going to fall in love with.

They landed at the docks by Magdalene Bridge. He requested a blanket, which she draped around her shoulders like an ermine.

They walked back towards Trinity through the tourist crowds. Diana was soaked, shivering, river weeds in her hair. A couple

walking past laughed under their breath; a group of children sitting on the wall by St. John’s were staring, mouths hanging

open. Joe would have been mortified. But Diana walked on like the street was a red carpet, head held high, wearing the weeds

in her hair like a diadem. He understood: by turning her humiliation into a performance, she made it about something outside

herself. None of it could touch her.

She led him up the stairs, past her neighbour’s painting that looked now like a lightning strike, frozen at the moment of impact in a world turned sideways. In her room, she came into focus: a queen no longer, but a girl he could see and touch, her wet dress clinging to her body. She grabbed a towel and headed for the shower. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said, in a husky, commanding voice that gave him the shivers.

He was left alone in her room, feeling like a spring wound up to an unbearable compression. He tried to calmly peruse her

walls: the noticeboard covered with reviews of her shows, the pictures of Sarah Bernhardt arranged into a shrine above the

fireplace. Every detail was an arrow pointed to her future, lit up with how fiercely she wanted it.

“I think I figured out what’s missing.”

He turned. She stood, naked under a towel, her collarbone and her bare shoulders a speechless poem. The scent of her damp

skin drove every other thought out of his head.

His voice came out hoarse. “Did you?”

“To understand your poem, I need to know it from the inside. Feel what you were feeling.” She stepped closer, sliding her

arms around his neck. “Can you show me?”

Her words were hesitant, but her expression was certain: she had no doubt about where this was going. With plunging realisation,

he understood that she had choreographed this moment, from the punting trip to falling in the river to bringing him back here:

all of it a performance, painstakingly crafted to seduce him. He should have felt manipulated. But all he could feel was a

kind of amused relief. All his worry about being a pawn of fate, about acting out a prewritten script, when it was Diana who

had been quietly pulling the strings all along, manoeuvring him exactly where she wanted him. And that in itself—to be wanted,

so frankly and so confidently—took his breath away.

She doesn’t really want you, whispered a traitorous voice. She wants the man who wrote the poem. But that man wasn’t in her arms, her fingers trailing across his neck, making questions of if and might and should seem impossibly abstract and faraway. He was here with her, and even if the person she was interested in didn’t really exist

yet, he could pretend to be him for a while.

“Yes,” he said, and kissed her.