Biographies in which artists change wives without apparent outrage or destruction (because the tale is told from the artist’s point of view) give the false impression that it can be done cleanly, without the charred flesh and gouged innards.

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 small bottle of mineral water. I feel deeply appalled that he’s started the process of extrication. My thighs on the seat feel weak. I’m not seeing properly. Terror of the magnitude of these events. And grief. For them, and their marriage.

On the spare bed at R’s in the afternoon I try to sleep, counting my breathing, but wide awake. Something’s gone. I know what it is: the necessity for stoicism. A hard jacket’s been taken off me. At first what I notice about its absence is a kind of blank surprise—then a fencelessness. My thoughts no longer run up against the monolith. I lie under the cheap quilt, calm, empty, complete, as if at the end of some trial. ‘The monolith.’ That smashed thing. Full of holes. Air and light now pass through its breached walls. Who’s responsible?

R says that now is the time when I should consider what giving up my separateness could mean, that if I live with him I will of necessity become ‘cook and bottle-washer’. Painfully I consider these propositions. But how could I not live with him? Could I fight him about the housework? Could I make demands and hold out for them?

I am a woman. I (i) long to be of service (ii) like domestic order (iii) am socially quite skilful—at organising lists of appointments etc (iv) can do basic cooking (v) feel an urge to fill gaps where otherwise chaos, awkwardness, discomfort (physical, emotional, social) might occur (vi) like to make practical demonstrations of love. All I need to attend to is that I keep enough of myself free for my work and the hours of private mental time this requires. I mean that my attention to him and his needs should not outweigh my attention to myself for work. ‘All I need’! This terribly hard thing, for a woman.

Swam ten laps at 6 am. Now I feel my stomach muscles. Read some Hemingway, then Carver again. Carver’s middle period. Large respect for him, the jagged voices, the catastrophes, the spare language and the striving for spare imagery. In such a landscape of struggle, panic, despair, the old images he uses have a deep and emblematic power. The hem of the garment. The simple becomes tremendous.

Dreamt that V’s wife drove up to my house in a car packed with her belongings; it had been arranged that she could store them all at my place. I offered to give her a hand. The house lacked storage space but I saw I could pile her things up against a wall in my bedroom, which was enormous, bare, dim and pleasant, with floorboards and a shuttered window; they wouldn’t be in the way, and I could keep an eye on them for her.

I never knew before the difference between sadness and sorrow. Sadness is general, broad, heavy, passive. Sorrow is sharper, more focused, more active, working hard. I could even say labouring. Labouring with sorrow. When I think of his wife’s unhappiness, my own ‘indignities’ almost vanish—because the reason he gives for requiring them is to save her from further pain. He does not see that this is unlikely to work, in the long run.

V showed me a couple of American short stories he likes: Irwin Shaw, ‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses’ and ‘Mixed Doubles’ and then one by Cheever, ‘The Enormous Radio’. They brought me up once more against the hopelessness of men and women, the vast chasms between them—the death of sexual love, wandering attention, physical degeneration, men’s wide-ranging sexual fantasies and greed. At the market we had a stupid quarrel about a melon. In the car he wouldn’t meet my eye, and down I plummeted. I longed to say, ‘What happened? What’s gone wrong?’ but I was scared he’d say, ‘Nothing! You’re neurotic! You’re imagining it!’

We quarrel over his demand for furtiveness. I find it humiliating. He says I’ve over-reacted to a minor event. I say he doesn’t know how minor or major this incident is to me. Our wills clash. I feel the toughness and irony in him and I display my own. He says, ‘I’ve suffered horribly through all this, these last few months.’ ‘I know you have. But you don’t show it.’ ‘You only had to look at me, to see it.’ I begin to be ashamed of myself. ‘I love you,’ he says, ‘without pride.’ ‘I know you do,’ I say humbly; ‘I love you, but proudly.’ I return to E’s, a sobered woman. This terrible pride. Through it I begin to understand the imagery of Christianity—the longing to be washed, to have chains struck from me.