‘It’s mad,’ said Z, ‘to think that only what lasts matters. How can that be? If we lose everything? It can’t be. And we all lose everything. Everything.’ I asked if he found the ephemeral enough; I said that so far I thought I did. He said yes. I said that what he’d been saying reminded me of the end of Ecclesiastes. ‘ “In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble…And those that look out of the windows be darkened, and the grasshopper shall be a burden…” ’ He went very still, looking right at me. ‘That passage,’ he said, ‘is the centre of my book.’

I begin to wash the dishes. I’m so tired I’m hallucinating. I can’t sense where in the tiny flat he is: I see a shape dart in the corner of my left eye, and think he’s crouching in the dark to jump out and frighten me. I put down the dishcloth and step sideways to check. Nothing there. He has gone into the bedroom. I lie on the couch. ‘Are you coming to bed?’ The married person’s question. ‘In a little while.’ I wash my feet, put on my nightie, get into bed. ‘I’m aching like a bastard,’ he says. ‘It’s those bloody typhoid and yellow fever shots. I feel hollow behind the eyes and in the chest—as if hot winds were blowing all through me, down my arms and legs.’ I say nothing. He lays down his book (African Discovery) and turns to me: ‘Forgive me, if I’ve made you unhappy and angry.’ I’m amazed that after all that madness he can lay his weapons down. H: ‘I’m sorry too.’ V: ‘You haven’t done anything to be sorry for.’ We lie side by side, wrung out. ‘It’s astonishing,’ he says, ‘and I’m mortified by it—how I wanted to go on and on with it, even when I could see it was making you more and more unhappy. I never got bored with it. I wanted to keep going.’ He was speaking almost wonderingly, as if about something he’d never experienced before. I said, ‘We had to get to the end of it.’ He said, ‘I love you more, for your toughness and your seriousness.’ I don’t remember now what I said.

I have to swear an affidavit for F’s and my divorce. I went to the university bank and asked if they had a JP. A shy young man with gold-rimmed spectacles dug out from his glassed cubicle a tiny, battered, green New Testament. There we stood at the open counter, in full view of customers and tellers. I wanted to say, ‘This is for a divorce. It’s rather personal. Can we do it in your cubicle?’ But I thought I should discipline myself to do things wherever I am presented with them. I kept my palm flat on the little green book and he asked me to swear. I swore, and read out the highlighted words: ‘So help me God.’ The solemn moment of the oath rushed past me, like the moment of communion at the altar rail. I didn’t prepare myself. Is that why it flowed past me without ceremony?

William Styron in Darkness Visible—how hearing Brahms’ ‘Alto Rhapsody’ had hauled him back from suicide. A day when I’d been struggling with V and was dully washing up: the radio was on, and they played a Brahms string quartet. For the first time I knew what the word ‘grace’ meant. It came dropping gently on my head, through the music. My anger and sadness flowed out of me and were gone.

He said that I was very ‘touchy’. I said that this was true. He asked what he did, or was, that made him hard to live with. After a lot of thought I said it was his tendency to enjoy stressing the negative in everything that came up; that it made me very tired, as if I were dragging behind me a heavy bundle, ‘the vibe’. I notice that since this conversation he’s stopped snarling, whenever the phone rings, ‘Oh, who the fuck can this be?’

I think of my characters now as actual people. Their ‘paltry experiences’ have actually happened. I long to continue the slow, deliberate hacking of stone which will allow me to know their futures.

The book rolls forward at its own rate, acting as a black hole that sucks into it everything I think, witness, overhear and see on TV. Today, instead of trying to perfect each paragraph before I moved forward, I thought, ‘Fuck this! I’ll keep barrelling on.’ Hours passed in big bursts and I ended up with seven pages of stuff I could never have foreseen or invented. Reeled back to V’s with sore eyes and an empty head. This must be how it’s done—take your foot off the brake, unpurse the lips and see where it takes you.

A heaviness, around the heart. A heaviness in breathing. I keep running through details of the story, trying to ‘be him’ and ‘see it through his eyes’. Is it a vengeful story? Not as far as I can tell, in my present state of awareness. Does it give a complex picture of my relationship with O? Yes. Very. It goes through the worst of both of us, and the best of him. It was necessary for me to write this story. I remember asking Raymond Carver if there was any line he drew round parts of his life, or people he’s been engaged with, across which he would not go. He thought for a moment, very carefully, and said, ‘It’s my job to write down life as I see it.’ Pause. ‘It’s a jungle out there.’ Patrick White’s savagery. His utter ruthlessness. Chekhov, the women in The Darling and The Butterfly: do people imagine that he made up these terrible characters, from thin air?

The characters that people I know become when I write about them are, to me, almost totally separate from the people themselves, once I’ve finished the piece of work and put it aside, or published it. It’s as if I’ve extracted or borrowed from the real person the aspects of them that I needed to struggle with, and the character consists only of those aspects. I can return to the real person with no sense of overlap. Cold comfort.

It was a warm summer night and we talked for a long time without quarrelling. V said he had to have ‘an asbestos suit on’ in order to criticise my work. We came at this vexed topic from several angles, lying on our bed beside the open windows. I said, ‘I know I’m hypersensitive and unpleasant. But I’ve been trying hard lately to be more reasonable.’ ‘Well, it has got a bit easier, but I’m very wary of it.’ I tried to explain that I would readily accept his criticisms if only he would preface them by telling me whether the work had affected him, whether it had touched him in any way. He said he’d told me something in the book was ‘quite moving’. I think I would have remembered that, but maybe I’d had a moment of deafness; anyway I privately seized on ‘quite moving’, knowing it was all I could ever hope for. I said that I had a very high regard for him as a reader, and deeply respected his literary opinion, but that after his technical comments he’d never mentioned the book again. He’d dealt with it briskly, like an obligation, and buried it. I said that I kept hoping he might mention something that had stuck in his mind or made him laugh—but he never did. I said I was disappointed that he hadn’t been more…comradely. He listened, without interrupting. Then he said, ‘I would never expect you to respond to my work in the way you’re describing.’ ‘But I did. Didn’t I? When your book came out? I talked about it a lot. I said how much I liked it, I quoted lines from it, I remembered turns of phrase and things that were clever and funny—I enjoyed talking about it.’ ‘I do remember you being very nice.’

Oh, what’s the point of all this—saying it in the first place, writing it down later. I don’t know how we’ll be able to live together as writers. I can’t see a way, unless I drop all this craving for…what? These grudging crumbs he’ll drop in front of me if I pester him? I long for him to let me see how my work affects him. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it leaves him cold.