Page 11 of Love and Other Paradoxes

He turned towards the market square. The street seemed to stretch out forever, the roof of the Guildhall pointing the way to infinity. Outside the Cambridge Arts Theatre, a group of girls stood in a circle, hugging themselves against the cold. One of them was dressed as an angel. She wore a white silk gown, and a tinsel halo nestled in her dark curls. She laughed at something he couldn’thear, then stared away over her friends’ shoulders, like she was looking through the present to see what was on the other side.

“Greeney!” Rob yelled. “Come on!”

The girl was swaying, her gown shadowing the impossibly graceful movement of her body. Something about her was intensely familiar. He stepped closer, trying to work out where he knew her from. Not college; not a seminar; not the awkward charity blind date that had ended with him and his match agreeing she should get back together with her boyfriend. No, what he felt when he looked at this girl was both more distant and more intimate, as though they had spent lifetimes together in a dream.

She turned her head, looking up at the moon. For an instant, her profile was caught in a streetlight. His heart did a somersault.

“Greeney!” Rob had been shouting for a while. “Last chance, or we’re leaving you behind!”

Joe didn’t answer, because he had just realised the girl was Diana.

Chapter Five

At first, he didn’t believe it. She was an idea from a book: she couldn’t be here. Had he somehow willed her into existence, constructed her like a mad scientist out of words and desire? But as he moved closer, it became undeniable. Those were her eyes, her pale green eyes,like chips of sea-glass; that was her smile, the enigmatic, shifting smile he had compared toa wind-blown shadow. He walked on like she was his destination, like his whole life had been a long, slow trudge towards her.

Just before he reached her, a flicker of doubt assailed him. The book didn’t say exactly where and when they had first met. How could he be sure this was the right moment?

The hesitation lasted until he remembered the leaflet.Anything you do in the past has already happened.He wouldn’t be here, inches from her, unless this were meant to be. A beatific smile spread across his face.And on that fateful night, a voice like the Introduction said in his mind,Joseph Greene would meet his eternal muse, his one great love.

“Diana Dartnell.”

The shock of her attention paralysed him. It was as if he had been standing in a gallery, admiring a portrait of some long-deadbeauty, only for the subject to lean out of the frame and beckon him closer. But when their eyes met, he realised he had seen her before. In fact, he had collided with her, on his way out of Trinity after his visit to the Wren Library. The sense of rightness, of destiny, swelled in him like a crescendo. His muse had appeared exactly when she was needed; he just hadn’t had the sense to recognise her.

She looked at him curiously. “Yes?”

And he froze. His first chance to talk to the love of his life, and he had no idea what to say. He prodded his brain to think of something, but his brain was for some reason fixating on her costume, and just kept repeating the same stupid chat-up line about whether it had hurt when she fell from heaven. He was about to walk away, pretend it had all been a misunderstanding, when something came into focus like the sun through a magnifying glass. He didn’t need to find new words to say to her: he already had a book full of them. He cleared his throat and recited from memory:

No one who had seen her

dressed as the night, the moon caught in her hair

could say: I do not know beauty.

For beauty

demanding to be known

spilled out of her, like blood-dark wine

from the shattered glass of her heart.

She stared at him in utter confusion. “I’m sorry, what?”

He felt like he had stepped onto a bridge that had crumbled. The air yawned beneath him; the waves clamoured for his bones. He sank down into himself. “It’s—it’s poetry.”

“Yes, I am familiar with the concept.” Her voice was low, her accent brittle glass. She glanced downward, her immaculate brows knitting in a frown. “Why do you have a toy train hanging off your jumper?”

“I’m ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster,’” he explained, confident she would get it.

She shot a look at one of her friends. “Isn’t that in rather bad taste?”

“No, it’s—the poem—” He ran a hand through his hair. “McGonagall? ‘For the stronger we our houses do build / The less chance we have of being killed’?”

She studied him for a moment with perfect disdain. “I preferred the first one,” she said, and turned back to her friends.

“We should go,” one of them was saying, as if Joe hadn’t spoken, as if he weren’t falling screaming into icy water. “Cindies is only free entry till ten.”

Diana sighed. “And what a tragedy it would be to miss out on Cindies.” Under the performative ennui, he caught a longing for something else, a desire for the transcendent that he recognised.

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