I went to work and broke through a brick wall or went round the side of it or dug under it or something: Athena’s moral crisis and flight. The pace picked up incredibly. Present tense. A weaving and twining of many a disparate thread. All these years of note-taking, of being what Joan Didion calls ‘a lonely, anxious re-arranger of things’, are now paying off. I even got in the skier on the colour TV in the Italian cafe! That image has been dogging me for ten years at least.

The day I realised my novel was going to be a short one, and that its domestic subject and setting were quite proper, I walked home from work and passed a print shop, in the window of which stood a copy of that van Gogh painting of the inside of his bedroom: floorboards, a bed, two cane-bottomed chairs, a window. I thought, That’s a beautiful painting. And it’s only the inside of a room.

To Paul Crossley’s piano masterclass at the Con. After three hours of intense concentration I was completely exhausted. His teaching was very challenging. He was not a giver of praise or even of encouragement, except to one girl who played Ravel; everyone else played Debussy. I loved the language he used: not only because it was clever and striking but because it showed me that the way I have been trying to write about music is not, as I had feared, hopelessly romantic or amateurish. ‘A furtive texture,’ he said. ‘A harmonic wash in the left hand. Then he clears the texture. Let the harmony settle again, before we take off. Hover above what you’re going to do.’ The concept of phrasing began to have meaning for me, not to mention texture. And now I know what the pedal is for: to ‘avoid breaking the sound’.

At Castlemaine it was very warm. Even the night was milder than I’d expected. Discouraging memories presented themselves as I roved about the slopes picking up firewood. What does this almost-finished book say about men and women? There doesn’t seem to be a way of planning this. My attitude emerges as the story tells itself. I couldn’t help agonising over it, thinking of the smallness of my scope, the ordinariness of it, its bourgeois nature. What critics will say. What my friends will think and not say. How I will appear before the world. Oh shut up.

We stood on a slope and watched the moon rise: up it came, round as a drawing. We saw how the stars became brighter, sat deeper in space. M and her friend struggled to philosophise. They laughed, and were excited. ‘I can’t sort of grasp,’ said M, ‘what there is beyond the universe.’ We all played the ukulele when we felt like it. She made up a song called ‘In the Paradise Cafe’. The boy read Tom Sawyer aloud: he couldn’t restrain his laughter. I woke at two in the morning, lay there filled with a kind of shame. Looking out at the moonlit bush, silver by night, grey by day. Don’t be so proud. Accept criticism, accept editing and guidance. No one will think less of you. I got up at dawn. There were tasks and I did them: finding wood, making a fire, boiling water. The sky became more orange and the wind began to stir. The coming light. It creeps across the dull grass and pinkens it, between the thin trunks. My panic left me. The problem becomes merely the work I still have to do, rather than an indictment of my whole personality and talent and social position.

Spectacular dawns I see from my bedroom window. Sometimes I look out at this richness of sky—layer after layer of colour rising from a bed of dove-grey cloud—and I think, This is a rich person’s view, or an adult’s view. As if I were not entitled to it, or had it only temporarily, or on sufferance.

I typed THE END. I rushed home ‘dizzy with unconsumed excitement’. Could not seem to get much of a response from the people present. ‘I’ve finished. I’ve typed the words THE END.’ ‘What—again?’ ‘Guess what, I typed THE END.’ ‘You’ll have more to do.’ But then someone went out to get champagne and they made a fuss of me, which embarrassed me, for I felt I should have been mature enough and tactful enough to have demanded less of them. I will never get this right.

Is this ‘the artist’s’ fate? Always to be loved less than I need; or somehow to repel love, or what is seen in the myth or dream of our society as normal marital love? I feel I’m reaching my strength, in my work, but there’s a corresponding falling-away…It’s terribly sad.

In my dream someone said to me, ‘I want to look for some graves.’ I said, ‘So you can desecrate them?’ Even in my sleep I was laughing.

Why married people have affairs: you feel luckier, with a happy secret place in your imagination in which to refresh yourself. My mistake in the past has been to keep it on the front boiler, cooking briskly, instead of turning off the gas and letting it go cold.

The Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante says that the writer is important not because he can write but because he can listen. His job is ‘to catch the human voice in flight’.