I think he’s lying to me. I said, ‘If you don’t tell me you’re seeing her, if you sneak behind my back and I find out accidentally, it makes me feel mad. It makes me crazy.’ He appears to take my point. But in a darker area of my thoughts I’m remembering his declaration, made to me several times over the years, in various contexts, and always with a note of defiant eternal-verity-ness which I would have to describe as smug: ‘All men are moral cowards.’

‘Now that you’re starting to go to things,’ he said, on our walk this morning, ‘I was thinking that’d be a good time for me to see X. In the evenings.’ Whereas he once used to think, he said, that it was ‘ridiculous and wrong’ of me to get up in the night and sleep in the spare bed (because he snored! which is not mentioned), he has now begun to see that ‘separateness, for adults, is a natural and good thing’. If it weren’t for X, I’d be fine with this. But somehow I feel manipulated, roughed-up by him. As if he’s turning me against myself. You want separateness? I’ll show you separateness!

Still. I’m going to find a place in myself to stand, from which I can engage better with V. I would like him to know that I don’t see him and his inflexible regime as my only possible source of happiness.

And I’m determined that I’ll give this marriage the best I’ve got, without thinking about ‘flight’, till he finishes his book. I’m going to work hard at not wallowing and being abject. I’m going to tell him what I feel, and not in an accusing tone. I’ll keep on inviting him to ‘things’, and going to them anyway whether he comes or not. Plus, I’ll try not to turn X the painter into the mule to carry all this anger.

V has raised again the possibility of my buying a little flat, as a work space and for visitors to stay. (Renting is anathema to him: ‘money down the drain’.) Tried to stay calm. Asked him if he could see any other way of resolving our situation about the flat. I can’t remember what (if anything) he said. I have a pathetic, unspoken hope, or fantasy, that one day he’ll say, ‘Look, we can solve it all in one simple stroke: I’ll rent an office.’ So many times this suggestion has been blasted away that I know it’s never going to happen. He offered to speak to a real-estate agent for me, to a tax accountant. I’m being very firmly pushed. Horrid little spurts of fear.

Only a man distracted by love will get up from the dinner table and return with a single glass of water; will barge first out the heavy front door of the building and let it slam in his wife’s face. The sick power of knowing something he thinks I don’t know; of knowing that he’s lying to me. The clumsiness of the lies, the humiliation of being clumsily lied to.

The morning after the Frenchwoman’s visit, as we walked, he took up his railing against ‘self-obsessed people’. His particular bugbear is people who never ask him questions. I asked him whether he’d always found himself surrounded by such people, or if it was a recent development. ‘Oh, there’ve always been some, but there are more lately. And when I went to live in Melbourne and met your family, I really started to become aware of it.’ I said, working at not being ‘emphatic’, that I’d had a bit of an idea about this problem. I said I’d noticed that when he met someone new he would soon begin to ask them quite intimate questions. They, surprised, would reply; and then he, rather than offering corresponding information about himself and his own life, as most people do in the give-and-take of conversation, would push on with further questions (always intelligent and sensitive) into the other person’s territory. In this way the other was drawn into revealing himself, while V remained veiled, and thus, in the end, more powerful. This made him furious. He said I’d ‘shifted the blame’ on to him. I said I didn’t think I was blaming anyone. I said I was trying to examine the dynamic of the phenomenon that bothered him so much. He battered away, declaring that men’s way of conversing is ‘better and wiser’ than women’s, because it doesn’t ‘depend on subjective anecdote’.

I stayed a night with friends at Mona Vale. V wouldn’t come. Ashamed to be sleepless, to be in this much pain. And yet this is life. The toughness of life. People’s utter, bottomless selfishness. This is what people do. The fact that I’ve been faithful to V for ten years has no weight, in the big scales of what will become of us. No ‘virtue’, no ‘self-control’ can save us, or protect us from each other. We can’t make room for each other. We push each other into the most extreme versions of ourselves, and then with a gritty determination we fight.

Everything fine in our bodies, but no emotional contact. No eye contact, no sound, not a word spoken. He turned his head sideways on the pillow so as not to look at me. In a small rush of courage I took hold of his chin and gently turned his head towards me: ‘Hello? Are you there?’ He opened his eyes. I said, ‘Hello? It’s me. I’m here.’ ‘Eh? What’s the matter?’ ‘I had a feeling things were happening only from the neck down.’ We both laughed. He said, ‘Of course they weren’t.’ But they were.

The nakedness of strangers. Every time I go to the Korean Bathhouse I feel more free. I can gaze at the perfect, and differently perfect, bodies of very young women without envy. May as well envy a tree, or a rock, in its perfect ‘thing itself’-ness. And the older bodies flabby or scrawny—marked by child-bearing or overeating or heredity, or just the attrition of gravity—they move me too, with a comradely feeling of respect.

I offered to go right back and expunge all—or all unfavourable—mentions of him. He looked sceptical. I said it would be a distortion, but that I’d do it if it was necessary. I also offered not to mention him any more, except procedurally. I said it was the first time I’d had to make a decision between being a writer and being married. He laughed and said I was overstating it. I said I didn’t think I was. This morning we spoke further about it. He expressed his revulsion again, but said he felt ‘awkward’ about seeming to ‘demand self-censorship’ from me. He said I should write an account of this disagreement, and then continue to write as before. This to me is not quite right. But I don’t know what I ought to do instead.

It would be a ridiculous distortion not to write about him at all. There’s no way he’ll ever understand that writing about my life is the only thing that makes it possible for me to live it. I can’t (or won’t) give it up. And I won’t burn the notebooks or leave instructions for them to be burnt when I die: this last is where he’s putting the pressure on. Actually I feel real sympathy for him. It must be awful to know his life is being reported through my eyes. It would be awful to be married to me.