Activity

In the sauna with the ship’s doctor. We get naked and talk, red-faced and dripping. She says stress can make your fingernails crack and peel, and your hair fall out. She parted from her husband five years ago. It took them ‘six agonising months’ to break up: ‘I didn’t want to live, at that stage.’ …

I am beginning to see that you can’t numb yourself and step cleanly out of a marriage. You can’t just pack your stuff and walk out the door. There is no door. You have to dynamite your way out. Blast, burrow, crawl—and you have to let yourself keep on feeling it, every inch of the way.

X: ‘Your marriage must have been in a very bad state. When did this begin?’

H: ‘I beg your pardon?’

X: ‘V has told me that you live separate lives.’

H: ‘That’s not true.’

X: ‘You told me he said I didn’t like you, and was not interested in you. I asked him. He said he had not said this.…

Yes, he says at last, it had been an affair all along, though not sexual till very recently. I don’t believe the second part but at least I can breathe: I wasn’t mad, all last year. But the following day he claws back the ground he’s given, becomes proud and defensive and cold. He’s back in his con…

Eventually he admitted it. She had flown down to Melbourne after I’d left, he’d met her at the airport and they’d set out straight away. When I got home from the lunch party yesterday and found him all hot and flustered, he’d just dropped her off at her place. I flung myself on the couch and wept a…