Page 27 of Love and Other Paradoxes

“So? How are you feeling? Are you ready?”

He stared unblinking at Dr. Lewis. This was his final supervision, the day before the start of his exams. “No. Yes? Maybe.”

He rubbed his tired eyes. “I don’t know.”

“It’s common to feel that way at this point. You just need to let go of the outcome, and do the best you can.” She settled

back in her armchair. “You’ve really impressed me this term, Joe. Of course, no result is guaranteed. But you should be very

proud. You’ve done the work. Now you can focus on the future.”

He tried to feel proud, but he couldn’t feel much of anything. Esi’s words were still ringing in his ears. I thought you were better than this.

Dr. Lewis peered at him. “What’s up?”

A sudden lump in his throat. He swallowed it. “I guess—I’m finding it hard to get excited about the future.”

“It can feel a little abstract sometimes. You know what always used to help me?” She drew an arc in the air as if she were

opening a portal. “I used to imagine my future self, coming back to tell me who she had become.”

He almost laughed. He thought of Joseph Greene the poet, stepping through the wormhole with a smug smile and a copy of Meant to Be , and felt physically ill. “What if I don’t like my future self?”

“Then that’s a sure sign you’re on the wrong path.” She clapped her hands, making him start. “Invent a new one! That’s the

point! The future is nothing but the sum of all our present moments.”

The idea was terrifying. To walk up to Joseph Greene, celebrated poet, and decide not to become him. To take a different path.

“But what if my new future’s not as impressive?”

She scoffed. “Who cares?”

“Easy for you to say. Your future was being a professor at Cambridge.”

She gave him a sly look. “Do you know why I play the sousaphone?”

A complete non sequitur. He stared at the instrument’s looping coils in desperation. “Because it’s a symbol of infinity?”

“No! Because it’s fun . It’s loud, and it’s silly, and it’s like wearing a musical hug. It makes me happy.” She got to her feet, signalling that

the supervision was over. “You’re twenty-one, Joe. Find what makes you happy. Wherever that leads, you can’t go wrong.”

He left her rooms and walked out into the court. The spring breeze whipped through his hair, swirling the grass into unpredictable

patterns. He thought about destiny and desire, and the gap between a life and a work of art. He thought about the version

of himself he wanted to be.

He went up to his room and reached under his bed for the book. He leafed through it one last time: the Introduction, with

its top-down, distorted view of a life turned into an idea; the poems, strange and distant now, like set texts for an exam

he had failed and forgotten. He slid it into the inside pocket of his jacket and went to find Diana.

He knocked on her door, but she wasn’t home. He sat on the floor outside to wait for her. He looked up at Efua’s painting, the shining gold paths through a rich, uncertain sea of black. He had thought one path was marked out for him. When he’d realised he had strayed from it, he had scrambled for the one that looked closest, a shortcut heading in the same direction. But in truth, no path had his name on it. He wouldn’t even see the path until he was at the end, and that was how it was supposed to be: not a fast-forward to the finish, but a hopeful, purposeful wandering, one faltering step at a time.

“Joseph? What are you doing here?”

He got up. Diana stood at the top of the stairs, just back from a show, the roses in her pale skin hidden by flawless makeup,

her eyes kohl-dark and infinite.

“We need to talk,” he said, and hated it as he said it, the way it flattened the complexity of what lay between them to a

cliché.

He saw her flinch, the mask briefly slipping. “Well,” she said in a low voice. “That sounds rather ominous.”

He could still change his mind. Whatever it was in him that responded to her, the part of him she made sing, desperately wanted

to. Maybe she really was his one true love. Maybe, by doing this, he was losing the chance of writing the best poetry of his

life. But the words came out, as if the choice had already been made. “This isn’t working. I’m not happy, and I don’t think

I’m making you happy either. I don’t listen to you, and I’m distracted all the time. And the truth is—”

“You’re in love with someone else.” She said it with soft resignation. When he looked puzzled, she laughed. “I told you. I’m

not blind.”

“That’s not all.” He reached into his pocket for the slim, innocuous shape of the book. “I’ve lied to you. Or at least, I

haven’t told you everything.”

He offered her Meant to Be . She looked down at it with confu sion, then with shock. She grabbed it, turning to the back, then to the inside cover. He watched her flick through, eyes darting, breath coming fast. It was intimate and a little disturbing, like looking through a wormhole at his past self.

She looked up at him, searching his face for answers. “What—”

“It’s real,” he told her. “Or, it was. But the future can change. We’ve already changed it. For starters, we met twelve years

early.” He leaned in to kiss her cheek. “Read it. Then call me if you want to talk.” He went back down the stairs, leaving

her alone with her heart’s desire.

The next morning, his exams began. As he left college, the time travellers’ usual spot across the street was deserted. His

gut plunged with the finality of his decision, until he remembered: Vera had told him the trip would be suspended until his

exams were over. He tried to focus on what Dr. Lewis had told him. Let go of the outcome. Do the best you can.

Two weeks passed in a blur of urgent scribbling and constant low-grade terror. Finally, he came out of his last exam into

the blinking sunshine. Champagne corks were popping, three years of pent-up anxiety spilling out into hysteric laughter. The

hard part was over. May Week beckoned, seven days of parties and day drinking, but to him, it was nothing but a clock counting

down to when Esi would leave.

He hadn’t spoken to her since the night she had found out he was with Diana. There was so much he wanted to say to her. He wanted to thank her, for showing him a truth about himself he couldn’t have recognised alone. He wanted to tell her he loved her. He wanted, more than anything, to ask her to stay. But there was no way she would say yes. She was already set on forgetting him; there was no need to make it any harder.

His phone buzzed. He looked down, heart in his mouth, but the message wasn’t from Esi. It was from Diana.

I want to talk. Meet me at Byron’s Pool.

He followed the river to Grantchester, past the sounds of drunken picnics and punters falling in the water. The pool wasn’t

easy to find; he got lost in an orchard, then had to ask directions from a man who looked like he had stumbled out of the

nineteenth century. Finally, he found the wooded trail and followed it down to the river.

Diana was sitting on a jetty in cropped trousers and a white blouse, hugging her knees. Beyond her, the river broadened out

into a grey basin, matted with weeds and algae. He wondered if in Byron’s day, there had been a concrete weir covered in warning

signs. The reality was so distant from the green, shaded idyll in his head that he wasn’t sure he’d come to the right place.

Then he realised. That was the point. The reality and the idea were two separate things: you had to live one, even if you

were striving to become the other. He thought of himself seven months ago, staring up at Byron’s statue, overawed by an ideal

he could never live up to. But Byron couldn’t live up to it either. This pool was just a place, and he had just been a person:

a rich, aristocratic person, who had felt at home enough in Cambridge to make a joke of it, but no more essentially a poet

in himself than Joe was. The statue crumbled, revealing nothing but a young man in deep water.

He sat down, rolling up his jeans to dip his feet. Diana looked sideways at the crooked line running across his shin. “Nice scar.”

“It’s on the wrong leg. But thanks.” He focused on the water, the sun glinting off the ripples in the grey. “I’m sorry. I

told myself I was sparing you the burden of knowing the future. But that’s not my decision to make.”

“No. It isn’t. But I understand.” She saw the relief on his face, and laughed. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m furious. But I

understand. Probably better than anyone. I know what it’s like to focus so single-mindedly on what you want that you stop

thinking of other people as people.” She said it lightly, with a self-deprecating air, but he felt the accusation and, worse,

the justice of it. “Did you know, all this time, that you were changing the future?”

“No. For a long time, I thought I was making it happen.” It was hard to believe, now, his arrogance, his conviction that time

would work in the way that suited him best. “By the time I realised, it was too late.”

She smiled wryly. “Well, this certainly makes sense of a lot of things. I kept seeing people following me around. Odd-looking

people. Like someone might come to a 2000s dress-up party in fifty years’ time, you know? And this bored-looking woman in

a tabard who kept ushering them away.”

“That’s Vera,” he said. “She’s the tour guide.”

“Vera?” She made a face. “I suppose it has to come back in fashion sometime.”

“They shouldn’t have been following you. My future self might have sold the rights to my life, but that didn’t include the

rights to yours.”

She smiled. “I didn’t mind. I’ll have to get used to it, after all, if I get where I want to go.” She lifted her hand. “Speaking of which. Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

He looked at her, puzzled. She sighed and pointed to the huge diamond that he had failed to notice adorning her ring finger.

“I’m engaged.”

He still didn’t understand. “To who?”

“The Duke of Devonshire,” she said, in such perfect deadpan that for a confusing moment, he believed her. She rolled her eyes.

“Crispin, you loon.”

“Why?” He stared at her, appalled. “You don’t have to marry him. Surely that’s one good thing to come out of all this mess.”

“Of course I have to marry him. Because I do.” She took Meant to Be out of her bag and laid it on the jetty between them. “It happens. On the way to where I’m going.”

He looked down at the book, then up at her, the frozen black-and-white face and the living one, shade-dappled and intent.

“But—none of that has to happen now.” He drew his feet out of the water and swivelled to face her. “You can do anything. You

can be with someone else, or not be with anyone, or you can have a harem of guys you see on a rota. You can move to Borneo,

or become a lion tamer, or—or freeze yourself in a cryogenic tank and wake up in the future.” He laughed in hoarse desperation.

“The possibilities are infinite. I know that’s scary, and I know you’ve built yourself around one idea of who you’re supposed

to be. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only version of you that could ever exist.”

She looked at him steadily. “Joseph. I’ve been perfectly clear with you who I am, and what I want. Did you think I was lying? Or did you think I wasn’t sure?” She shook her head, throwing a twig into the water. “My whole life, I’ve been sure about exactly one thing. Other possibilities don’t interest me.”

He watched the twig float in place, pushed and pulled by invisible forces. “But—think of everything we changed. We’re on a

different path now, for better or worse.” He tried to say it gently. “Diana, your future in Meant to Be —it might not even be possible anymore.”

“I know that,” she snapped. “I’m not an idiot. But given that I still want it, what should I do? Pretend I’m walking blind,

stumbling through the rest of my life? Or use what I know”—she laid her palm on the book—“to make sure I don’t change anything

else?”

His mouth moved helplessly. “But Crispin—he doesn’t have to be part of that future. He’s not the reason for your success.”

“Do you know that for certain?” She held his gaze, challenging, until he looked away. “Wanting to be an actor is an insane

dream, Joseph. Success is balanced on the slimmest knife-edge. If I do succeed, a lot of it will be down to luck.” She frowned

into the deep water. “I can’t be sure that Crispin is part of that luck. But I can’t be sure he isn’t. Maybe he introduces

me to someone. Maybe the experience of being married to him turns me into the right person to play some crucial role. I don’t

know. But the best way of reaching that future is to follow the path that already led me there.”

It sounded like what he had said to Esi, huddled on the sofa in his parents’ house, before his life had been upended by a

bike crash and a kiss. He wanted to tell Diana that she was wrong, that he knew better now, but she wasn’t him: she hadn’t

been through what he had been through, and even if she had, she might have learned something completely different.

She tapped his arm. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I never wanted to be a person, remember? Much less a happy one. My sights are set elsewhere.”

He stared out at the river. He imagined Byron on his back, weeds tangling his feet, something tugging him down to the green

depths. I’ll choose my art. Every time. It made sense, in a twisted way he wished he didn’t understand. It was a choice he might have made himself, once upon a time.

In another universe, perhaps he had. An image transfixed him, sudden and dizzying: the two of them sitting by the river, overlaid

a hundredfold, a thousandfold, their outlines trembling with a million potentials.

She held out the book. “Here you go. It’s yours, after all.”

He took it. He ran his hand over the cover, thinking of the first time he had seen it, falling out of Esi’s bag onto the street;

of the uncloseable gap between then and now. “It’s not mine,” he said. “I stole it. But the person I stole it from doesn’t

want it.” He handed it back. “And I don’t need it anymore.”

“They’re very beautiful. The poems.” She looked down at her own face, austere in black and white. “When I read them, I see

her. The me I want to be.”

Her words should have made him feel something: joy, pride, satisfaction. But he didn’t feel any of those things, because it

wasn’t about him. He had no more ownership over the poems than he had over Diana herself. “So keep them.” He shrugged. “It’s

you I would have written them for.”

“All right.” She tucked the book into her bag. With a wry smile, she added, “You can keep the photo.”

He didn’t understand. “What photo?”

“The one of Efua and me.”

Everything rearranged in his mind, an optical illusion flipping from one state to another. “You do know her.”

“We were friends in first year. No dramatic bust-up, if that’s what you’re thinking. We just grew apart. Different priorities, you know.”

He thought of what Esi had told him about her mum: academic to the exclusion of all else. Meanwhile, Diana never read anything

she wasn’t about to perform. It made sense. “So why did you lie?”

“She has her reasons for not wanting to be found. I might not understand those reasons, but I try to respect them.” She got

to her feet. “If I’d known it was her daughter looking for her, I might have made an exception.”

He felt ashamed; she was more perceptive than he’d given her credit for. He was running through the reasons Efua might not

want to be found—that she had a stalker, that she was in witness protection—when Diana cleared her throat. “Well. See you

in twelve years, I suppose.”

He stared up at her. “What are you talking about?”

“Our fateful meeting. Our great love.” She tilted her head. “Are you saying it’s not going to happen?”

“It can’t. Not anymore.” He laughed. “I’ve spent the past seven months trying to live up to those poems, and it’s impossible.

If we’d met like we were supposed to, if our lives had come first and the art had come second...” He shook his head. “But

it can’t work the other way around.”

“Maybe that’s how you feel right now.” She looked down into the opaque depths. “But in twelve years, you might change your

mind.”

He looked her in the eyes. “I won’t.”

Her voice was wry as she walked away. “You sound very sure, for someone who believes in infinite possibilities.”

He turned to watch her go. He wanted to say something, a final line of the unfinished poem they had been writing together, but perhaps this was how it was supposed to end: her shape receding into the woods, her fate left open.

He had meant to sleep in the next morning, but his exam-tuned nerves woke him at half past eight. He lay for half an hour

trying unsuccessfully to get back to sleep. Then he sighed, got dressed, and went downstairs, going out of habit into the

post room.

In the doorway, he stopped. For the past two weeks, his pigeonhole had been empty. Now it was full again.

He crossed the room and sorted through the contents with trembling hands. A white rose. A snow globe of Paris. A scribbled

note. He unfolded it. Joseph Greene. Thank you for teaching me about love.

He dropped everything on the floor and ran to the front gate. He opened the door a crack, peering out into the street. There

they were, in their usual spot: Vera and her tourist huddle, craning anxiously towards the entrance.

He pushed the door closed and backed away, his guts churning. What did it mean? Was Diana right? Were the two of them inevitable?

Or was he going to live out the same love story, write the same poetry, about someone else? Both possibilities seemed completely

insane.

“Greeney!” Rob came out of the Porters’ Lodge, beaming. “Incredible news. Just spoke to my mate who’s on the May Ball committee,

and he told me Darcy’s going to be attending. Guess Trinity was too pricey for her.”

Joe blinked at him. “Her?”

Rob looked confused by his confusion. “What, you assumed she was a man just because she has a male pseudonym? It’s 2006, Greeney. Women can be soulless killers too.” He rubbed his hands together. “She thinks she’s getting the PhD, but my black hole’s going to get her first.”

“PhD?”

“I told you,” Rob explained with exaggerated patience. “Paranoia Hardened Death-Master. The award you get for winning the

Game twice.”

“Award?” He felt like a radio tuning back in, static shrieking into coherence. “Sorry. When’s the Ball?”

“A week from now. Twenty-third of June.”

It all came together in his mind, like a clump of inexpert stitches knitting into a black hole. Darcy, short for The Deadly

Mr. Darcy. Mum was into period romance. Rob’s number one rule of the Game. Make yourself hard to find. The sympathy card he’d found in Efua’s pigeonhole, a few days after Darcy had been “killed”: an Assassin friend’s idea of

a joke.

He reached into his pocket for the picture he’d ripped out of the book. Mechanically, he unfolded it and showed it to Rob.

His roommate looked up at him, puzzled. “Why have you got a picture of Darcy with Diana?”

He put the picture back in his pocket. He knew what the award was. And he knew how to stop her from winning it.

“Greeney?” Rob was watching him with concern. “You okay?”

“Sorry. Got to go,” he said, and sprinted out of the gate.