There’s a tremendous weight coming from somewhere, pushing me towards feeling that I’m being short-changed, that there’s something humiliating in my situation. I hate it. I think it’s wrong. I fight it. Because I’m happy, when I don’t think about it in that way.

Women can endure things and keep going because our lives are made up of small practical physical tasks, and no matter how lonely or sad or humiliated you are you do the dishes, or wash the clothes, and you come to the end of a small task and see a small result.

M talks about a 2 am death freak-out she had in the motel at Numurkah where we shared a room. ‘I kept looking at things in the room—chairs, a table—and thinking, “What are they for?” ’ Why didn’t she wake me? My punishment for her arms-length upbringing is her powerful independence, her resolute not-need of me. But when I told my friend with cancer this story he said, ‘Two things. First, she’s able to get through a dark night of the soul without needing to wake anyone. Second, dark nights of the soul are personal. You feel you want to go right to the end of it, and afterwards you’re proud of yourself for getting through it alone.’

Z lambasts a new biography of Hemingway for its ignorant assumptions and ‘psychologising’. Compares Hemingway’s photo on the cover (‘that terrible face—but good’) to the biographer’s on the back (‘isn’t he awful—so smug—and it’s taken by his wife, dear little woman’). ‘These bastards,’ he says, ‘they’ve never written a novel, they don’t have a clue about the writer’s life. They live all their lives safe in a university, with a wife and kids. They’ve got no idea of the risks writers take—I don’t just mean the risks on the page but the way we make ourselves uncomfortable in life, so we’ll learn things.’

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever taken on, in my whole life. Its huge demands: self-discipline, solitude, secrecy; the frustrated longing to speak about it. I pick up his moods. His wind blows on me and I shiver and tinkle. And yet I like my life, perhaps better than he likes his. I don’t have to tell lies.

‘Do you think people can ever avoid betraying each other?’

‘No. Because promises can’t stop everything from moving and changing.’

He goes home to his life. I will always be displaced by it. And here I am again in this room, calm, half-sleepy, looking forward to going back to my life. We will never be a couple. One day we will find the sexual passion gone and a friendship taking its place. And through it all his marriage will have sailed serenely on. A radio’s on, somewhere out there, a woman singing wildly. A train passes. I don’t care. Nothing can touch me. The power of work. Art, and the huge, quiet power it gives.

Dinner in Camberwell with my angry sister. She arrived full of bitterness against the tax department, and against me for having lived on a supporting mother’s benefit when M was very small. Went to see Huston’s The Dead at the Rivoli. She fell asleep twenty minutes in. The middle-aged couple on my other side talked all the way through. When Gabriel sees his wife on the staircase, the bloke said, ‘Look at that wallpaper. It’s peeling.’ And during the great monologue at the end about the snow ‘faintly falling’ all over Ireland, the woman said, ‘Huh. Depressing. Bit depressing.’ All the way home I felt a violent hatred for common sense.

‘His father went to jail.’

‘What for?’

‘Theft, I think. Embezzling, maybe.’

‘Embezzling’s creepy, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Worse than straight-out theft. It’s the betrayal of someone’s trust over a long period.’

Horrified that he might think I was referring obliquely to his behaviour towards his wife. But he didn’t seem to notice, and went on talking.

Biographies in which artists change wives without apparent outrage or destruction (because the tale is told from the artist’s point of view) give the false impression that it can be done cleanly, without the charred flesh and gouged innards.