Late this afternoon X the painter called me on the phone. She was in bed with flu. First thing she said was, very politely, ‘I don’t know why you think we can help each other.’ An hour of conversation followed, a quiet comparing of notes, during which many long pauses fell. Pauses of thought. Of stunned attempts to match up pieces of information. Turns out that right from the start he told her we lived separate lives: ‘He told me you are an old hippie; that you had separate friends, that you would not mind his visits to me.’ Even before last Christmas he told her we’d decided to part: that we were parting because we weren’t able to resolve our disagreements about work and the flat and about both being writers. When I found the first letter (neither of us mentioned the hat) she had told him she was not prepared to continue with him until he sorted out his marriage. I said he’d told me that he made the renunciation in order to save the marriage. She said she had held out for months, keeping her phone unplugged, not reading his letters; but that on Mothers Day she had plugged the phone in and he’d got through: he’d told her I was going back to Melbourne to live, that I was ‘happy’ about the decision, that we’d reached it together, that we liked and respected each other and would remain friends. Thunderstruck, I said that I’d thought of going back to Melbourne only because the pain of his lies had become unbearable‚ that I couldn’t stand the pain.