Activity

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…

I rang up X and said I was sorry if I’d seemed ‘rude and cold’ to her on the phone. She was puzzled: ‘I didn’t think you’d been rude and cold?’ ‘Oh. That’s what V told me you’d said.’ We didn’t know what to say next. But wished each other well and hung up. This must be what G meant when he said he …