Tracing the entwining paths of life and love

“Do you think that if we all had a kind of tracker device, a tiny light that you could see from space, then everyone’s paths would loop and intertwine as ours have?”

It’s the question asked by Tess, the heroine of Miss You, a novel out this week which is being hailed by its publisher as the next One Day – the 2009 bestseller in which two friends meet on the same day of each year, then finally fall in love.

Following on from a lucrative deal in the UK, there has already been a “pre-emptive” bid for Miss You in the US, and a scramble to buy it in 24 other countries. Author Kate Eberlen, 58, is as amazed as anyone at the response.

“When I wrote it, I had no idea if it would even sell,” she says (Kate is a nom de plume that she prefers to her real name of Imogen).

Suffice to say, as the publishing deals roll in, she and her husband, who is about to retire as a state school teacher, are planning to move to Rome for the winter, and then perhaps Venice next year and who knows the year after that.

The central idea of Miss You is that two young people – Tess and Gus – meet by chance in Florence when they are 18, and she and her friend ask him to take a photo of them.

The story tracks the two over the next 16 years, during which time their paths cross repeatedly but without them knowing it. (When Gus is having passionate sex in an aeroplane lavatory, Tess and her little sister, who has Asperger’s, are waiting outside.)

The natural progression of the novel, of course, is that the two end up together. As the novel’s blurb says: “Tess and Gus are meant to be. They haven’t met properly yet. And perhaps they never will.”

“I’ve always been fascinated by how many lives there are in which paths cross, how many encounters we have or almost have,” says Eberlen.

“Then when I was coming up to London one day, I was looking out the window at those rows of houses and wondering who lives there, if their lives had ever crossed with mine. I thought, ‘what if there were two people who were right for each other but their paths kept crossing and missing’.”

It’s not a new idea of course – the 2001 film Serendipity is based on exactly this power of “fortunate happenstance” – but it is one that is endlessly enduring.

Why do we all love the idea that the universe is acting out some bigger plan to bring together two people?

Eberlen says: “I think it is more about luck – and it is so much to do with timing because, in the case of my characters, if they’d have got together when they were 18, it wouldn’t have worked at all.”

The role of chance, luck and timing was never more relevant than in the beginning of Eberlen’s own marriage. Having grown up in Hitchin, outside London, she went on to St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she read classics. In her first year, she attended a party in Hertford College’s cricket pavilion. Her husband-to-be, Nick – whom she was only to meet properly in 1991, aged 33 – was also there.

Over the ensuing 14 years, during which he was teaching English abroad, he would occasionally appear at various friends’ parties, but nothing happened. In fact, Eberlen developed a dislike-at-a-distance. Finally, aged 33, grief-stricken from the loss of her father and working in publishing, she agreed to host a party in her new flat in London and allowed her friends to pick the guest list.

“I remember saying, ‘who’s coming?’ and they gave a long list of names and then said ‘and Nick’. And I said, ‘not that prat who lives in Egypt!’

“But when he arrived,” Eberlen continues, “we just started talking. He was a much more grown-up person than I remembered and I suppose I was more mellow because I’d had so much sadness in my life. We talked all night,” she pauses, “and he never left the flat again. A year to that day we got married”. They have now been married for 24 years, and have a 20-year-old son.

Eberlen had a series of novels published when her son was growing up, but then moved into teaching. Miss You was her first foray back into writing after several years off, and at the beginning her confidence was low. Indeed, when the book was finally submitted to publishers, and Eberlen received a text from her agent she assumed it had been sent in error and didn’t bother to call him back.

“In the morning I had another string of messages from him saying, ‘Where are you? Ring me’,” she recalls. Publishers were battling for the rights to the book.

Was the book based on her own relationship with her husband? Not consciously, she says, but “it must have been in there somewhere. During all those 14 years, I never once thought we’d have been suitable for each other. I had this notion – a bit like Tess – that love had to be passionate and full of suffering, and with somebody more Heathcliffian.

“When we finally got together, I remember thinking, ‘goodness, he’s really lovely’. I hadn’t even noticed until then that he was actually very good-looking.”

Eberlen says the fact that she was reeling from her father’s death was crucial in opening her eyes to her future husband’s kindness. So, along with luck and chance and timing, there is also your frame of mind. For most of us, our lives are shaped by relationships which we try, or fail to make work.

So to contemplate the idea that the “universe”, “fate” or “meant to be” is instead steering our lives is at once romantic and freeing.

These stories of romance captivate us, even more if there have been years of prolonged suffering during the search. In One Day, there is heartbreak at the end too: Emma gets killed in a road accident. In Miss You, well, without giving it away, it’s not all hearts and roses and running off into the sunset.

And as we all know, life is never straightforward. Even The One might snore at 3am. — The Daily Telegraph