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The morning after the Frenchwoman’s visit, as we walked, he took up his railing against ‘self-obsessed people’. His particular bugbear is people who never ask him questions. I asked him whether he’d always found himself surrounded by such people, or if it was a recent development. ‘Oh, there’ve alw…

Only a man distracted by love will get up from the dinner table and return with a single glass of water; will barge first out the heavy front door of the building and let it slam in his wife’s face. The sick power of knowing something he thinks I don’t know; of knowing that he’s lying to me. The cl…

V has raised again the possibility of my buying a little flat, as a work space and for visitors to stay. (Renting is anathema to him: ‘money down the drain’.) Tried to stay calm. Asked him if he could see any other way of resolving our situation about the flat. I can’t remember what (if anything) h…

Still. I’m going to find a place in myself to stand, from which I can engage better with V. I would like him to know that I don’t see him and his inflexible regime as my only possible source of happiness.

And I’m determined that I’ll give this marriage the best I’ve got, without thinking about ‘…

‘Now that you’re starting to go to things,’ he said, on our walk this morning, ‘I was thinking that’d be a good time for me to see X. In the evenings.’ Whereas he once used to think, he said, that it was ‘ridiculous and wrong’ of me to get up in the night and sleep in the spare bed (because he snor…