He tells me that the vision of life that’s in my work is not real; it’s much less bad, dark, mischievous, painful etc than real life. It holds out some belief in the essential goodness of people. It is a picture of the way I’d like life to be rather than the way it really is.

‘I’m afraid your pessimism will contaminate me,’ I say.

‘If you believe in good, why are you afraid that bad will contaminate you?’

It’s like arguing with the devil.

In the discussion I ran the line against possessiveness that we thought was so cool in the seventies: ‘Jealousy is a completely useless emotion.’

Psychoanalyst: ‘On the contrary. I think jealousy is at the cutting edge of the psyche.’

Me: (riveted) ‘What do you mean?’

Psychoanalyst: ‘It’s painful, but it shows us in no uncertain terms that we are not rational beings. That our lives are not under our conscious control.’

A poem translated from the Arabic called Homesickness. Words to the effect of ‘Once again you take out your knife and stab me’, and then this: ‘Nobody knows whether I am dancing or staggering.’

‘There is something between me and her.’

‘Since when?’

‘Two weeks.’

I keep walking but put my hands in my pockets.

Nobody knows whether I am staggering or dancing.

I told the Jungian how I hated and feared the kind of privilege claimed by beautiful women.

‘And how have you claimed attention, Helen?’

I did not like being asked this question.

‘Sex. Using my brains.’

The gist of it is, I guess, that I wasn’t vulnerable, or feminine. F says that I didn’t need him enough, that I barged straight through him. I have to accept this in silence. Because it is true.

I am a forty-three-year-old woman, a mother, healthy, reasonable-looking; I am in my own city; I am able to make a living; I am sometimes sad or frightened, and recently I have been hurt; but I am also learning to examine myself and my crimes less defensively; the Mighty Force has not lately come to me in the form I was expecting; but it does not abandon people, and it won’t abandon me.

In the Botanic Gardens A and I lie on two blankets that he’s spread on the Oak Lawn and read The Europeans aloud. The bliss of being read to. The speckled shade, small children shouting and running across the grass. We take it in turns, chapter by chapter. The long sentences tax our powers of forward-seeing, but our skills develop as we warm to it. My crabby temper evaporates in the beautiful autumn day. The leaves are hardly brown, let alone on the ground.

‘Afterwards she repented it bitterly, but she was hopeless at apologising: instead of retracting her feelings, what she always did was to say that she was sorry for expressing them, a kind of amends that costs nothing and carries the built-in rebuke that the other person is unable to bear the truth.’ —Penelope Gilliatt, ‘The Redhead’, in The Transatlantic Review

Primrose Gully. My sister comes down the track from the car, all in black, sunglasses, white-faced, like a refugee. Very upset and weeping. The married man she’s having an affair with, his coldness in public, his failure to turn up, she lay awake all night waiting. Disgusting memories of my own. I talked at length about humiliation, low self-esteem, self-punishment etc. I must learn to shut up. Talking loosely and inefficiently is an indulgence. We went for a walk to look at the river, and back across the gully under the big pine tree. We picked up firewood. In the morning she said, ‘I woke up once in the night and looked out the window. The sky was full of stars. I thought I must be in heaven.’

A doco about Berlin after the war. Footage of a boy of eight or so picking his way across a huge pile of building rubble, cap on head, pack on back, bare knees, boots—answering the questions of a disembodied voice: ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’ve lost my family. I’m looking for them.’ ‘How long since you saw them?’ ‘Six weeks. Goodbye!’ He smiles, turns and walks away, a man with a mission—then a few yards further on turns again, waves, calls out ‘Goodbye!’ and goes on his way. I stood at the sink dumbly washing and stacking, despairing of ever having anything worth saying. I know nothing of what is savage and cruel in life. My work is as ignorant as I am. I don’t know anything. But maybe it’s the devil talking when we get the idea that someone who knows no savagery knows nothing—as if only evil were real and the rest weightless.