Page 78 of Love and Other Paradoxes

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 shininggold 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 herMeant to Be. She looked down at it with confusion, 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 wasno 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, ifI get where I want to go.” She lifted her hand. “Speaking of which. Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

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