Last night, V sat beside me on the kitchen couch and took my bare feet on his lap and told me what he really thought about ‘Recording Angel’—that it was ‘a very strong story’, but that O would have been shocked to read a description of himself at his lowest, in hospital after that dreadful operation: to be revealed and scrutinised while in that state. I began to feel the horror of what I’ve done. I heard myself jabbering the same old justifications, how I thought I’d done this and what I’d meant was that, and it made me sick. I broke off mid-sentence and got up and walked over to the sink. He said, ‘What’s up, sweetheart?’ I said, ‘I’m sick and tired of myself, that’s all.’ He came and put his arms round me and gently kissed me. The awful truth is that no one can help you carry the consequences of your behaviour. You are required to carry them on your own.

Woman after woman, five of them in a few days, came up to me to say they liked ‘Recording Angel’. And each of them said a version of ‘It’s full of love.’ I’d better get used to this. Men see it one way, women another.

While I was cleaning the bathroom basin V came in and we had an interesting discussion. Leaning against the door jamb with his arms folded, he advised me that it was time for me to stop writing ‘about the 70s’. Oh? Why’s that? Because the 70s was a ‘period of bullshit, of clapped-out theories that Victoria is now bearing the brunt of.’ Apparently G shared his opinion; indeed he had told V that he’d already had ‘a little talk’ with me about it. I said we hadn’t spoken about this as far as I recalled. Shifting my energies to the bath, I pointed out that certain social changes had occurred in the 70s that people had been deeply affected by—that this could not be scrubbed out of either my characters or me, and that to attempt it would not make sense. I said that his work was coloured by different assumptions because his ideas were formed in a different era and through different experiences. I said that whenever I read him I felt that I was in the 50s. He said that much of his work was set in no-place and no-time. I said that it was in the relationships between men and women, and in the underlying assumptions about these, that period still made itself felt. He asked me what I thought about what he’d said. I said, opening the toilet lid and attacking the rim of the bowl, ‘I don’t think anything in particular.’ He pressed me harder. I said, ‘I understand the point you’re making. But I can’t say how it will affect me, until I sit down to write the next thing.’ I forbore to point out that in the simple fact that I was on my knees scrubbing the porcelain as we talked, and in the fact (which he had only the other evening admitted publicly without shame or remorse) that he has ‘never cleaned a lavatory in his life’, resided a thundering piece of…whatever it is we were talking about: a whopping great assumption about men, women and domestic labour which dates him, and judges him, as accurately as does any misplaced nostalgia that I have been reproached with.

‘I think you should learn the second Czerny,’ said my piano teacher. ‘They make a pair. You’ve been on the first one long enough.’ ‘Okay. I love boring exercises.’ ‘I’ve noticed,’ she said. ‘You must be looking for something deeper in the music. Something spiritual.’ We laughed but I wasn’t quite sure whether she was teasing me.

I’ve been offered a job reviewing movies for a monthly magazine. Out of the depths of my ignorance I take it. The editor, gossiping about a certain journalist, says, ‘Like all bullies and authoritarians, he’s very easily wounded.’ Later I report this to V. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that’s good, isn’t it. Did you, um, think it might apply to you? A bit?’ ‘Yes, I did,’ I said, hanging my head. And the more easily wounded one is, the more bullying and authoritarian one becomes. To protect the shivering chasm at the core.

At the Sydney International Piano Competition I sat in the second row where one can see the sweat splashing off their noses and chins and soaking the hair on the backs of their necks. I’d been in a mood for never hearing Mozart again, but a Frenchman played a rondo with such airy clarity and creamy smoothness that I nearly passed out. People in the audience become intimate friends with strangers. By the next session they have completely forgotten each other.

We walked along the creek this morning. Wind very sweet and balmy, a drying wind. High, creamy clouds, burst through by sheets of sparkling sun. The first spring-like morning. The green shoots clearer on every tree, and everything seems in motion, standing up to the wind in good humour.

The imagery V uses in ordinary speech, loaded with reluctance. ‘I’ll dump you off at work.’ ‘I said I’d cart her round the bookshops.’ ‘We’d better get rid of’ (i.e. eat) ‘those potatoes.’ ‘I suppose I’ll drag m’self into town.’ As if the ideal were stasis.

Janet Malcolm’s big New Yorker essay on the biographers of Sylvia Plath: boom! She shows me that the things I’m too timid to write can be written—that I should trust the stuff that my inner censor has been telling me to scrap. Meanwhile, in the New York Times someone reviews a book: ‘a model polemic, full of autobiographical detail, conversations with friends, family and colleagues, and debates the author has had with himself and critics.’ Is that what a ‘model polemic’ is? I think maybe I can do that.

G writes. He has been present at the birth of the baby, a girl with ‘long, splayed fingers: I think she could manage a tenth already, on a proportionately reduced piano. I’m dizzy with exhilaration and lack of sleep—exalted, absurdly happy. Is there a plan, Helen, or is it just women carrying on with life, civilising through that peculiarly feminine self-abnegating and unselfconscious love? In awe and wonder, your respectful friend.’