I rang up X and said I was sorry if I’d seemed ‘rude and cold’ to her on the phone. She was puzzled: ‘I didn’t think you’d been rude and cold?’ ‘Oh. That’s what V told me you’d said.’ We didn’t know what to say next. But wished each other well and hung up. This must be what G meant when he said he thought of V as ‘a manipulator; a spider in the middle of the web’.

I’m coming to see that he has no conceptual equipment—nothing that would help him to analyse a mess like the one we’re in. All he can do is repeat his statements of will and purpose. But when I calm down and start taking things apart, he listens to me and almost always agrees. Or appears to. Because what I say lets him off the hook. Of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Neither of us is a criminal. At those moments I have a powerful sense of myself as working.

We’re engaged in a bitter struggle to define ourselves, each against the other. He sets his face against things that have meaning to me; and my urge is to split hairs and demand exactitude. I suppose I’m just as unbearable to him as he is to me.

I’m dangling in the space between old customs and new ones I don’t know how to establish.

At lunchtime I take V to see the place. He says very little. I notice myself becoming anxious and disappointed: I want to drag a response out of him. I want him to like it. He withholds in obedience to some dark part of his nature. I keep control of myself: whether he likes it or not is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT. In fact, this irrelevance is part of the point of my renting it in the first place. Finally he says, ‘You can bring some of our old clapped-out cups and saucers down here.’ ‘Bugger that. I’m not putting anything in here that I don’t really like.’

Walking home from La Buvette.

H: ‘These sandals have turned out brilliant. Last year I thought, “Oh bum, they’re a lemon,” but suddenly they’ve gone all soft and comfortable.’

V: (glances down; grunts)

H: (mimics his voice) ‘Huh. Pity they’re so ugly.’

V: (with a cross laugh) ‘You bloody women! You always think you know what a bloke’s thinking!’

H: ‘No we don’t! We have to make it up! You won’t engage with us! You won’t answer when we speak! You present us with a blank face! We have to invent a response, out of loneliness and despair! So we won’t have to live in an emotional vacuum!’

He says he can’t talk to me any more, that I keep correcting everything he says, that I’ve got a list of subjects that I don’t want to hear about any more.

I say it’s because he never has anything new to say on those subjects, and only rants and fulminates—how boring young people are, the worthlessness of popular culture, the tedium of first-person writing. He says he experiences my response to this as censorship, and trimming. I say I can understand why he wants to spend time with someone fresh, who hasn’t heard all his opinions yet, who can admire him and be refreshed by him and look up to him, and be advised by him on what to read—the Stendhal, the Berlioz. His love of certain writers is new to her. He seems miffed by this.

Don DeLillo, interviewed by David Remnick in the New Yorker: ‘Between books,’ he says, ‘what happens is, I drift. I feel a little aimless. I feel a little stupid, because my mind is at odds. It’s not trained on a daily basis to concentrate on something, so I feel a little dumb. Time passes in a completely different way. I can’t account for a day, a given day. At the end of a day, I don’t know what I did.’ The work, when it starts, ‘comes out of all the time a writer wastes. We stand around, look out the window, walk down the hall, come back to the page, and in those intervals, something subterranean is forming, a literal dream that comes out of daydreaming.’

He questioned me about why I was ‘a jealous person’, and what I thought jealousy was. I said it was a panic, a terrible fear of being rejected or replaced. I said that one of the things I loved in Proust was his brilliant, hilarious accuracy about jealousy and his intense interest in it. V said he thought there was far too much about jealousy in the book, and that what he liked was the ‘overarching’ shape of the book and its interest in time. He said that if he were a jealous person like me he would try to get control of it. I said I had worked hard to get control of it. He said, ‘What’s the evidence for this?’ I said, ‘The fact that you’re still walking around, for instance.’ He half laughed. I said I sometimes thought that if I were a man I’d be in jail. ‘What for,’ he said. I said, ‘For violence.’ This irritated him, and he said so. He said that I ‘despised the rational’ and ‘worshipped feelings’; that I ‘used’ feelings. I asked him if he thought there was anything about his personality that might also be contributing to our troubles. He went vague. I asked him what sort of person he thought he was. He replied that he thought he knew himself pretty well, that he had a clear view of what he was like; and even though some of the aspects of this were ‘not very good’, there was no point in trying to change them now, since there was little hope that people could change their basic nature. He said he thought he had a tendency to meanness, that he could be generous but that he tended towards the mean. He was ignorant about some things, disinclined to forgive, impatient. ‘I know I can be charming, but sometimes it’s a con job.’ He asked me once again, tipping his head back and staring down his cheeks, whether I thought he should ‘see a shrink’. I said that I would never try to persuade him to do it, that it had never occurred to me to suggest it to him.

I don’t know what look is on my face, during these horrible low-voiced conversations: on his, a blank stubbornness, mouth tight, chin up. He’s fighting me for his own survival, just as I am fighting him: for respect, and for self-respect, for a place to stand.

V admires a pair of grotesquely high heels that Marilyn Monroe is wearing in a photo. I look at them and see two instruments of torture. He speaks at some length about how women who wear high heels are showing that they like men, that they’re prepared to ‘put up with a bit of discomfort’ to please a man. They are much more feminine than women who wear flat shoes or runners.