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I know, from my own experience, that people can recover from things. And I can’t see the end of a marriage as the end of a life. ‘Life goes on,’ says R. ‘It must go on. It can’t stop.’ ‘And it can’t go back?’ I say. ‘No,’ she says, ‘it can’t go back.’ In a blighted cafe in Rozelle V and I share a s…

‘His father went to jail.’

‘What for?’

‘Theft, I think. Embezzling, maybe.’

‘Embezzling’s creepy, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Worse than straight-out theft. It’s the betrayal of someone’s trust over a long period.’

Horrified that he might think I was referring obliquely to his behaviour towards…

At Mum and Dad’s I sat sideways on my chair, staring out the window. Dad said, affectionately (for him), ‘What are you thinking about, Helen?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘just the meaning of the universe.’ A true answer would have been, ‘I’ve found the love of my life, and he’s married to somebody else.’

During the wedding ceremony I asked myself why the simple hopes of these promises are so impossible when the complications of life fall on them like a collapsing wall. I do not understand marriage. V is always talking about symmetry but we are not symmetrical at all. I am offering everything and he…

The flight to Sydney lasted only five minutes because I was reading Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur. When her husband comes back after the war I cried so much my face twitched, I had to wipe my eyes on my skirt. ‘I remember the sobbing all through the house, the tenants lingering on the stairs, the do…