Activity

Walking home from La Buvette.

H: ‘These sandals have turned out brilliant. Last year I thought, “Oh bum, they’re a lemon,” but suddenly they’ve gone all soft and comfortable.’

V: (glances down; grunts)

H: (mimics his voice) ‘Huh. Pity they’re so ugly.’

V: (with a cross laugh) ‘You blood…

At lunchtime I take V to see the place. He says very little. I notice myself becoming anxious and disappointed: I want to drag a response out of him. I want him to like it. He withholds in obedience to some dark part of his nature. I keep control of myself: whether he likes it or not is COMPLETELY …

I’m dangling in the space between old customs and new ones I don’t know how to establish.

We’re engaged in a bitter struggle to define ourselves, each against the other. He sets his face against things that have meaning to me; and my urge is to split hairs and demand exactitude. I suppose I’m just as unbearable to him as he is to me.

I’m coming to see that he has no conceptual equipment—nothing that would help him to analyse a mess like the one we’re in. All he can do is repeat his statements of will and purpose. But when I calm down and start taking things apart, he listens to me and almost always agrees. Or appears to. Becaus…