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He goes home to his life. I will always be displaced by it. And here I am again in this room, calm, half-sleepy, looking forward to going back to my life. We will never be a couple. One day we will find the sexual passion gone and a friendship taking its place. And through it all his marriage will …

‘Do you think people can ever avoid betraying each other?’

‘No. Because promises can’t stop everything from moving and changing.’

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever taken on, in my whole life. Its huge demands: self-discipline, solitude, secrecy; the frustrated longing to speak about it. I pick up his moods. His wind blows on me and I shiver and tinkle. And yet I like my life, perhaps better than he likes his. I don’t have t…

M talks about a 2 am death freak-out she had in the motel at Numurkah where we shared a room. ‘I kept looking at things in the room—chairs, a table—and thinking, “What are they for?” ’ Why didn’t she wake me? My punishment for her arms-length upbringing is her powerful independence, her resolute no…

Z lambasts a new biography of Hemingway for its ignorant assumptions and ‘psychologising’. Compares Hemingway’s photo on the cover (‘that terrible face—but good’) to the biographer’s on the back (‘isn’t he awful—so smug—and it’s taken by his wife, dear little woman’). ‘These bastards,’ he says, ‘th…