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We went for a walk, early. Fresh morning: glossy water, tide high, clouds scattered, air spiked with perfumes from invisible flower-ing plants. We were both yawning. Coming up the steep part of Yarranabbe I said, ‘You know why we’re always tired? We’re exhausted from flogging a dead horse. Can’t yo…

He’s still insisting, always in the same words, like a mantra, that X is ‘just a friend. A good friend. That I like to see.’

I’m never going to get a blessing from him. He’s never going to tell me the truth. It’s beyond him.

Immense relief. Freedom, lightness, clarity. And thinking of V and his manoeuvres, a stunned, incredulous pity, even tenderness, as towards an oafish boy, a yokel, a creature barely evolved.

‘So,’ she said. ‘He stirred us up against each other.’

I said, ‘It’s obvious that he’s in love with you, but he won’t say so. If he’d been able to say to me, “Listen, I love X and I want to leave you and go with her,” I would have accepted it. I would have been hurt and angry and sad but I would…

Late this afternoon X the painter called me on the phone. She was in bed with flu. First thing she said was, very politely, ‘I don’t know why you think we can help each other.’ An hour of conversation followed, a quiet comparing of notes, during which many long pauses fell. Pauses of thought. Of st…