V’s proprietary tone when he speaks of the high priests of European literature—‘Yes, they are peculiar titles,’ he says about Canetti’s autobiography—reminds me of the German poet who boasted to me about how he had once sat up all night reading Chekhov’s letters. As if no one else had ever done this.

On my way out of the Athenaeum, so tired I could hardly speak, I was approached by a young woman.

‘I heard you read that story about the friend. The painter. It made me very angry. I thought it was a cruel story,’ she said, clenching her hands. ‘You took all the little illusions that people use to make life bearable, and you stripped and stripped and stripped them away. I’m trying to be a painter, and I—’

Exhausted, looking at her smooth pale skin, her items of silver jewellery here and there, I thought, Come back in twenty years, sweetheart, and tell me about your little illusions then.

I walk away, get into my car, drive home, and go straight to bed, at five in the afternoon. What I could have said to her was, ‘Listen. There is no comfort. And if you think there is, then maybe you’re not really an artist.’

When I have begun to carve out the little country of a story in which I will make my home for the next few days (or months, if it should be a novel) I feel a secret power. I don’t need to chatter.

After dinner the waiter brought L the wrong coffee, was corrected, went away. Time passed. He realised he’d been forgotten and from that moment the evening was lost. He went dark and stiff with rage. Anger spread into the air around him. A grille clanged down between him and the world. I panicked. All the air went out of me. I felt my face drop on its bones. He noticed and said, ‘What’s up?’ I said, in a small voice, ‘I feel sad. And scared.’ ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I just hate it when things like that happen, when people treat you like—’ I wanted to say, ‘He doesn’t scorn you, or hate you—he just made a mistake.’ But his whole ego was bound up in it. My own iron grille came down. I missed the chance to level with him. From then on we were both deep in reticence but keeping the superficial intimacy going. In the morning, a shyness. I like him. I envy his beauty and I hate the way it distorts his life. He is all split and troubled; and his loneliness is as bad as mine. We would wear each other out.

What am I setting up for myself, here? Some happiness, perhaps. I’m calm, and in good spirits, quietly, as if something important and good were about to happen. I’m not scared or nervous. I can’t even imagine it, how it will be, what it will look like, what felicities or clumsinesses either of us will commit. Bucket of cold water: he’s married. He is an intellectual and I am not. ‘He lives,’ said Z, who introduced us, ‘almost entirely in the world of books and ideas. I imagine that’s why he didn’t want to have children.’ Maybe he’s in the habit of having quick, harsh, demanding affairs. Or maybe this will be an important relationship, for both of us.

I see that what I am doing, in this diary, is conducting an argument with myself, about these two men, and myself, and men in general.

Gloomily coming into my bedroom I stump towards the bed and see the mess of New York Reviews beside it, and a copy of Joan London’s stories that are so beautiful, and I think, Whatever happens, I’ve got this one little power—I’m a writer. I can use everything that happens, I can use it and shape it and in that way I can get control of it.

The only way I can have anything to do with him is by (a) lies and (b) hurting someone. Am I prepared to do this?

One day I’ll have to burn this book. I use as buckets of cold water thoughts of his wife’s preparations for Christmas.

Maybe he’s the kind of man who conducts flirtations with women in such a way as to allow his wife to find out; she then puts a stop to the developing affair and, though he grumbles etc, this is what he wants, and needs. No idea why I thought of this. Just running through the painful possibilities.