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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…

A Tchaikovsky piano concerto, on my own. The idea of it made me yawn but soon my skin began to crawl and various thoughts came to me with the music as background. If I go ahead with this, I will be spending a lot of time alone. That’s something I am already good at, and often prefer. I will spend a…

These two men. I could say ‘I love you’ to each of them. To L in the most direct, old-fashioned and simple way: I know him, I like him, he is like me, we know each other without effort, two greedy, cheerful, sexy, sociable people, takers of foolish risks. To the other, how? A thinker, intellectual,…

Dinner with the retired academics. I made a big effort and stayed with the conversation. Spare me from old men’s calm assumption that anything they say, no matter how dull, slow or perfunctory, deserves and will have an audience. Their wives are still real, warm people, compared with these old blok…

[...] In a second-hand shop window I saw a pretty nightie I wanted to buy. Always, under whatever else is happening, a level of thought and fantasy about V and what is possible. I try out the idea of a mistress, some long-term thing running parallel to his marriage. I know my ego wouldn’t accept th…