Dinner with the retired academics. I made a big effort and stayed with the conversation. Spare me from old men’s calm assumption that anything they say, no matter how dull, slow or perfunctory, deserves and will have an audience. Their wives are still real, warm people, compared with these old blokes frozen in their own importance. The jerky little tales of eccentrics and their drinking. Sly innuendo about famous women they have known, one of whom was said to have had ‘sixty-four lovers’. I sat quietly, thinking, ‘You call that a lot?’ Is this what V means when he says women never understand that men want to be with other men? Dread: he too will turn out to be manly in that way—looked after by a woman, no longer alive to her yet still drawing full benefits from her love and sacrifice…Is there hope for women and men?

[...] In a second-hand shop window I saw a pretty nightie I wanted to buy. Always, under whatever else is happening, a level of thought and fantasy about V and what is possible. I try out the idea of a mistress, some long-term thing running parallel to his marriage. I know my ego wouldn’t accept this. When I’ve been with him I feel fed, and anxiety dies a little. Like a junkie after a hit, I am able to contemplate giving him up.

These two men. I could say ‘I love you’ to each of them. To L in the most direct, old-fashioned and simple way: I know him, I like him, he is like me, we know each other without effort, two greedy, cheerful, sexy, sociable people, takers of foolish risks. To the other, how? A thinker, intellectual, contained, cautious, measured, hard-working, private. And married. This will have to be lived. It can’t be walked away from.

A Tchaikovsky piano concerto, on my own. The idea of it made me yawn but soon my skin began to crawl and various thoughts came to me with the music as background. If I go ahead with this, I will be spending a lot of time alone. That’s something I am already good at, and often prefer. I will spend a lot of time waiting. And when I’m old I will be alone. How strange these thoughts are. They are serious thoughts. I am contemplating a course of action which at my age will have certain repercussions, important ones. Have I got, can I find in myself, the courage and strength to live like that? Would I want to be ‘married’? I am notoriously bad at it. It does not suit me. The wife envies the passion her husband feels for the mistress. The mistress envies the steady companionship…‘The world is made up of triangles.’

The flight to Sydney lasted only five minutes because I was reading Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur. When her husband comes back after the war I cried so much my face twitched, I had to wipe my eyes on my skirt. ‘I remember the sobbing all through the house, the tenants lingering on the stairs, the doors standing open.’ Her writing is so physical. The movement of her sentences captures the movement of emotion and thought—it’s real women’s writing, shameless but never sloppy. Maybe she’s what I’m looking for—to show me how to control emotion without being false to its power, how to be absent and fully present at once.

What am I doing? He has been married for more than half his life on this earth. Why should it be any different from any other love affair? Why shouldn’t it run through its phases, wither, and die? I’d better work if I want to survive this, and if I want to play my full and proper part in it. Who wants a lovesick, lazy drip, obsessed with her own emotions and full of resentment against fate?

During the wedding ceremony I asked myself why the simple hopes of these promises are so impossible when the complications of life fall on them like a collapsing wall. I do not understand marriage. V is always talking about symmetry but we are not symmetrical at all. I am offering everything and he is offering everything except the final thing, which in effect means that he is offering nothing. Is this true or is it just a smart crack? It is quite understandable to be stunned and even sick with fear when you’re heading for a brick wall at 100 miles an hour.

At Mum and Dad’s I sat sideways on my chair, staring out the window. Dad said, affectionately (for him), ‘What are you thinking about, Helen?’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘just the meaning of the universe.’ A true answer would have been, ‘I’ve found the love of my life, and he’s married to somebody else.’

The urge to blame V. To say, ‘He is selfish. He wants to have everything, for the world to revolve around him. He will never choose me. He should never have begun this.’ The cowardice of this urge. The old longing to play the victim. What’s required here is a bracing of the self. After all, ‘we’ ‘love’ ‘each other’. These hackneyed words. Who’s we? What’s love? Do we know each other? Or is each of us only a screen for the other’s light show?

Fantasy: V’s dead. No one close to him, of course, thinks to tell me. Finally, a day or two later, R calls: ‘H, I’ve got some very bad news…’ Odd feeling that he may as well be dead, he may as well never have existed. His existence is purely intellectual. I can’t even write him a letter. Because he doesn’t exist.

Reading an old diary. I cannot remember, even in the thinnest or most fragmentary moment, how it felt to ‘love’ the man I was in love with, back then. All that hideous torment, everyone suffering, and for WHAT? What would I remember of NOW? This one works, steadily, quietly. His mind does not take the easy way out. I can only live the thing to its fullest extent. This is what life is. It’s not for saying no.

Yesterday I felt lonely. I knew that he would not leave her. I forgot that I did not want to be his wife. A failure of imagination. I did not feel beautiful. I longed to be asleep. Woke, heard rain falling quietly outside, felt the desolation of my position. I thought about Primrose Gully, the room with the table, hearing rain there, looking out at rain falling, the healing of it. I need to go home.

I heard a gospel song in the car and a rush of Christian moral scruples came over me: ‘If I gave him up I would be a more virtuous person, more correct, more calm, more blessed.’ This kind of thing, which attracts me at times, is almost a death wish, a nothing wish, a blankness wish—like wishing that we could all like each other’s work, that there should be no conflict. The LIFE of life. No laws apply.

From a review of Jessica Anderson’s short stories: ‘…we are made to see the futility of trying to prolong an affair beyond its natural limits, and how little an outsider—even an ardent lover—can ever know of what actually binds a husband and wife together.’

Weird feeling, when I look at a photo of V that I took, that once again he does not exist, I have never met him, I have invented him, he is a FIGMENT. If a long enough silence should fall between us we would forget each other and slip back into our previous lives. Does he exist? No particular emotion accompanies these fancies. In fact it’s a breathing space between bouts of reality. I don’t miss him. How could I miss a flicker, a quick darkness. It would be easier if we never had any further contact with each other, but left each other’s lives alone. He won’t leave his wife, they’ll live out the rest of their lives together, side by side, without passion but with a strong familiarity, used to each other. What’ll I do? I’ll take up piano lessons again, learn to make plants grow, write novels. Summer will come. I’ll grow older. I’ll be happy. If I could be this calm, when we’re apart, then we could live it properly, honour it, without causing smash-up, pain, grief, humiliation. On the other hand, this state seems unreal to me, a kind of nothing state, an interim—or like sleep, or death. ‘First—chill—then stupor—then the letting go—’

While I’m in America, V is going to Africa. My fantasy: he doesn’t come back. I find out from someone that he’s lost. I fly to Sydney and say to his wife, ‘Come on. We’ve got to go and find him.’ She won’t come, flatly refuses, but when the me character gets to the airport, there she is. The two women set out. The conversations they could have! The silences, resentments, outbursts. And quieter passages: they have to share a bedroom in some shit hotel, two single beds, they lie parallel, like sisters, exhausted, angry, frightened. One begins to talk…would there be flashbacks? Voice-over? Flashbacks that don’t match what’s being related in the voice-over because each of them is having to embroider the truth.

Rain pours down. Lightning. A huge roll of thunder. He’s telling me about his famous friend in England and his ‘flat-chested, pug-nosed, short-sighted wife, a real sweetheart. She serves him.’ I want to say, ‘Does your wife serve you?’—not meanly, but because I need to know. I’m afraid that if she does, that this is what he needs and will continue to need so he can work. And before long he’s saying, ‘Do you think two writers can ever live together?’ I hardly know what load this question is carrying.

Possibilities: this will run its course and subside. He’ll sink back into his married life, its comfort, taking with him whatever he’s learnt from this. But what about me? I tend this seed of fear, water it, want it to sprout.

Each time I go to see Three Sisters at Anthill the same thing happens: when Masha makes her confession of love and asks rhetorically, ‘Is it wrong?’ the audience holds its breath. Everyone wants an answer to this question—even perhaps an absolution—but Chekhov won’t give one. There isn’t one. ‘These things cannot be legislated.’

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.

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.

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.

By being decent, you only extend your own period of suffering. I said, ‘I’m not waiting for you to leave. That’s not what I’m doing.’ But the truth is more like: ‘Tell me whether you ever will, or whether I must accept that the rest of my life will involve this complicated, delicate balancing act. What hurts me is the suspense.’ I didn’t say this. But I must.

I know, from my own experience, that people can recover from things. And I can’t see the end of a marriage as the end of a life. ‘Life goes on,’ says R. ‘It must go on. It can’t stop.’ ‘And it can’t go back?’ I say. ‘No,’ she says, ‘it can’t go back.’ In a blighted cafe in Rozelle V and I share a small bottle of mineral water. I feel deeply appalled that he’s started the process of extrication. My thighs on the seat feel weak. I’m not seeing properly. Terror of the magnitude of these events. And grief. For them, and their marriage.

On the spare bed at R’s in the afternoon I try to sleep, counting my breathing, but wide awake. Something’s gone. I know what it is: the necessity for stoicism. A hard jacket’s been taken off me. At first what I notice about its absence is a kind of blank surprise—then a fencelessness. My thoughts no longer run up against the monolith. I lie under the cheap quilt, calm, empty, complete, as if at the end of some trial. ‘The monolith.’ That smashed thing. Full of holes. Air and light now pass through its breached walls. Who’s responsible?

R says that now is the time when I should consider what giving up my separateness could mean, that if I live with him I will of necessity become ‘cook and bottle-washer’. Painfully I consider these propositions. But how could I not live with him? Could I fight him about the housework? Could I make demands and hold out for them?

I am a woman. I (i) long to be of service (ii) like domestic order (iii) am socially quite skilful—at organising lists of appointments etc (iv) can do basic cooking (v) feel an urge to fill gaps where otherwise chaos, awkwardness, discomfort (physical, emotional, social) might occur (vi) like to make practical demonstrations of love. All I need to attend to is that I keep enough of myself free for my work and the hours of private mental time this requires. I mean that my attention to him and his needs should not outweigh my attention to myself for work. ‘All I need’! This terribly hard thing, for a woman.

Swam ten laps at 6 am. Now I feel my stomach muscles. Read some Hemingway, then Carver again. Carver’s middle period. Large respect for him, the jagged voices, the catastrophes, the spare language and the striving for spare imagery. In such a landscape of struggle, panic, despair, the old images he uses have a deep and emblematic power. The hem of the garment. The simple becomes tremendous.

Dreamt that V’s wife drove up to my house in a car packed with her belongings; it had been arranged that she could store them all at my place. I offered to give her a hand. The house lacked storage space but I saw I could pile her things up against a wall in my bedroom, which was enormous, bare, dim and pleasant, with floorboards and a shuttered window; they wouldn’t be in the way, and I could keep an eye on them for her.

I never knew before the difference between sadness and sorrow. Sadness is general, broad, heavy, passive. Sorrow is sharper, more focused, more active, working hard. I could even say labouring. Labouring with sorrow. When I think of his wife’s unhappiness, my own ‘indignities’ almost vanish—because the reason he gives for requiring them is to save her from further pain. He does not see that this is unlikely to work, in the long run.

V showed me a couple of American short stories he likes: Irwin Shaw, ‘The Girls in Their Summer Dresses’ and ‘Mixed Doubles’ and then one by Cheever, ‘The Enormous Radio’. They brought me up once more against the hopelessness of men and women, the vast chasms between them—the death of sexual love, wandering attention, physical degeneration, men’s wide-ranging sexual fantasies and greed. At the market we had a stupid quarrel about a melon. In the car he wouldn’t meet my eye, and down I plummeted. I longed to say, ‘What happened? What’s gone wrong?’ but I was scared he’d say, ‘Nothing! You’re neurotic! You’re imagining it!’

We quarrel over his demand for furtiveness. I find it humiliating. He says I’ve over-reacted to a minor event. I say he doesn’t know how minor or major this incident is to me. Our wills clash. I feel the toughness and irony in him and I display my own. He says, ‘I’ve suffered horribly through all this, these last few months.’ ‘I know you have. But you don’t show it.’ ‘You only had to look at me, to see it.’ I begin to be ashamed of myself. ‘I love you,’ he says, ‘without pride.’ ‘I know you do,’ I say humbly; ‘I love you, but proudly.’ I return to E’s, a sobered woman. This terrible pride. Through it I begin to understand the imagery of Christianity—the longing to be washed, to have chains struck from me.

Dreamt I was in a play but had not learnt my lines. Another character spoke to me expectantly and my mind was blank. I feigned a collapse, fell to the ground and lay there for a long time. Nobody came to see how I was. I looked up and everyone had gone.

Reread my screenplay. The last section is dreadful—a post-mortem feeling. R came over to E’s for tea. Her light presence. We talked about standards in art, what it means that her mother likes Pro Hart, whether aesthetics is separate (as a study) from ordinary life. Whenever she’s with me I feel cheerful, curious, hopeful. In the evening I wrote out a series of system cards for the screenplay, one for each little scene. Gloom rolled away. I called F and we spoke affectionately of this and that. Woken at 6 am in my balcony room by crackling thunder and a steady flood of rain.

Melvyn Bragg interviews Saul Bellow on TV about The Dean’s December. Bellow grandly puts shit on sociologists, psychologists and criminologists for their failure to cure what’s wrong with society. V gives an admiring cheer. I am disappointed and say little. ‘I think,’ says V, ‘you weren’t very interested in what he was talking about.’ I realise I am withholding so as not to rock V’s boat. So I say, ‘I’ll tell you what I really think. I think he’s a windbag.’ To my surprise when we discuss this V comes a long way towards my point of view. So we are not dug in. Our egos are not in charge of our ideas. We try to list writers who became windy. Hemingway. Henry James. Faulkner? (I haven’t read him.) We agree that windy-ness is a male failing on the whole, and that women’s failing tends to be wetness. ‘Your mate Carver,’ he says, ‘is not windy at all.’ Is windy-ness to do with ambition? Is it also an American failing? Chekhov, we agree, is never windy. We decide to go away for the weekend. To have ‘an adventure’.

At E’s I opened the balcony door. A wind rushed in and blew my screenplay system cards all over the floor. I saw at once that this was a sign: that having used the cards to show me the order of the (hopeless) third draft, I had been allowing that order to dominate my rewrite.

The end of the movie. Who can help me with this? I groaned all day and then at 5 pm something happened. Strange power and freedom I experience, when I start to invent. It has its own logic. I feel my way along some kind of dark thread.

A visit from Mum. Terrific strain I’m under, when she and I are with other people. When we’re alone I can submit to this vast, slow, stunning stream of monologue and apply as little of my concentration to it as I need to (about fifteen per cent) in order to remain calm. Yesterday she talked so much—on the drive in from the airport, meeting E, shopping at Leichhardt, having coffee at Via Veneto, driving to Manly, walking on the beach—that by bedtime she was hoarse. She never asks a question, or listens. She starts every anecdote days, months or even years before its proper starting point. Her only liveliness in speech comes when she can criticise: idiot skateboard riders, lunatics on motorbikes, men unloading trucks in narrow streets, stupid dills who drop rubbish or leave security doors ajar. A film of the world as she sees it would be always swelling, blurring, lurching, swivelling—sparkling and looming with danger. At moments, while she drones on, there comes over me a painful tenderness. This ‘tenderness’, which if I told the truth I would have to call pity, has to do with my dread of becoming like her. V asks her straight out which of my books she likes the best. She says, shyly, ‘The Children’s Bach.’ I am embarrassed and don’t know where to look. I always give them copies, with a loving message written in the front, but she has never told me whether she’s read any of them. And I’ve never asked.

‘I sometimes think the world is divided into people who survive from their own inner strength and those who have to latch on to others to survive.’ —Elizabeth Jolley, interview in Good Weekend

I’ve sold my books. I’ve let my house. I’ve agreed to sell Primrose Gully. I’ve changed cities. I’ve got no home. I am not to answer the phone at V’s, or be present when certain visitors come, or leave my stuff lying around. I am forty-six-and-a-half and I am humiliated. V is unable to resolve the thing by telling his wife the truth. I say to Z that I wish V would deliver the coup de grâce. ‘The trouble is,’ says Z, ‘that to do that, which I agree he must do, he’ll have to admit, to himself as much as to her, that his leaving her had something to do with you. He seems to need to keep the two things separate in his mind. He’s still saying they’re separate—as late as yesterday he was saying it. What I think he should do is tell her that your existence hastened the end, but that he’d felt it was over for quite some time already.’ ‘And did you tell him that?’ ‘Oh no.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. That would be to deny the whole way he sees himself and his situation.’ ‘But Z. You’re his friend. It’s the responsibility, the duty of friends to help each other see what they’re doing. How else can we find out what we’re like?’ Z seemed very surprised and put off by this definition of friendship.

Work offers come and I take them. I don’t want to go over to V’s. What if his wife comes visiting and I’m there? Maybe a terrible explosion of truth is exactly what’s needed. I said, ‘She needs you to tell her the truth. Somewhere in herself she knows you haven’t told her everything.’ He will not accept this screamingly obvious fact. He decides to invite two friends to dinner, and casually assumes that I’ll cook. I say I won’t: he can’t expect me to turn on wifely service and then when it suits him pretend I’m only a casual acquaintance. He’s furious. We slug it out. He says he objects to the way I make flat pronouncements. I say he makes assumptions that aren’t even acknowledged by him as assumptions until I challenge them. I can’t see he’s got a leg to stand on here. We reach a truce, the passionate kind still available to lovers. But there’s a reserve between us. We both feel it.

A movie on TV about John Waters. I laughed till I was weak and grateful—I’ve been missing that angle of life—shit and fart jokes, the utter refusal to be in any way serious, intellectual or polite—and what is the quality Divine has, that ‘puts everybody in a good mood all the time’? I said to V, ‘There’s never any little treats in your fridge. And there’s not enough light and fresh air.’ He hates light and likes to keep the windows closed against the cold, though the place is a box in which he smokes cigars. He won’t ever stay a night with me over at E’s: ‘If I’ve slept somewhere else I find it really hard to get started on my work the next morning.’ I say briskly, ‘I used to be like that in primary school. But I got over it.’ He is delaying to infinity the duty of levelling with his wife. He is permanently lying doggo: ‘I don’t know why I have to tell her.’ Dumbfounded, I say, ‘You’re thinking of not telling her?’ ‘I don’t see why I should have to,’ he says, in a lightly defensive tone. I let it pass, in sheer astonishment. As if he thinks of himself as having simply walked out of her life.

‘It’s mad,’ said Z, ‘to think that only what lasts matters. How can that be? If we lose everything? It can’t be. And we all lose everything. Everything.’ I asked if he found the ephemeral enough; I said that so far I thought I did. He said yes. I said that what he’d been saying reminded me of the end of Ecclesiastes. ‘ “In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble…And those that look out of the windows be darkened, and the grasshopper shall be a burden…” ’ He went very still, looking right at me. ‘That passage,’ he said, ‘is the centre of my book.’

I begin to wash the dishes. I’m so tired I’m hallucinating. I can’t sense where in the tiny flat he is: I see a shape dart in the corner of my left eye, and think he’s crouching in the dark to jump out and frighten me. I put down the dishcloth and step sideways to check. Nothing there. He has gone into the bedroom. I lie on the couch. ‘Are you coming to bed?’ The married person’s question. ‘In a little while.’ I wash my feet, put on my nightie, get into bed. ‘I’m aching like a bastard,’ he says. ‘It’s those bloody typhoid and yellow fever shots. I feel hollow behind the eyes and in the chest—as if hot winds were blowing all through me, down my arms and legs.’ I say nothing. He lays down his book (African Discovery) and turns to me: ‘Forgive me, if I’ve made you unhappy and angry.’ I’m amazed that after all that madness he can lay his weapons down. H: ‘I’m sorry too.’ V: ‘You haven’t done anything to be sorry for.’ We lie side by side, wrung out. ‘It’s astonishing,’ he says, ‘and I’m mortified by it—how I wanted to go on and on with it, even when I could see it was making you more and more unhappy. I never got bored with it. I wanted to keep going.’ He was speaking almost wonderingly, as if about something he’d never experienced before. I said, ‘We had to get to the end of it.’ He said, ‘I love you more, for your toughness and your seriousness.’ I don’t remember now what I said.

I have to swear an affidavit for F’s and my divorce. I went to the university bank and asked if they had a JP. A shy young man with gold-rimmed spectacles dug out from his glassed cubicle a tiny, battered, green New Testament. There we stood at the open counter, in full view of customers and tellers. I wanted to say, ‘This is for a divorce. It’s rather personal. Can we do it in your cubicle?’ But I thought I should discipline myself to do things wherever I am presented with them. I kept my palm flat on the little green book and he asked me to swear. I swore, and read out the highlighted words: ‘So help me God.’ The solemn moment of the oath rushed past me, like the moment of communion at the altar rail. I didn’t prepare myself. Is that why it flowed past me without ceremony?

William Styron in Darkness Visible—how hearing Brahms’ ‘Alto Rhapsody’ had hauled him back from suicide. A day when I’d been struggling with V and was dully washing up: the radio was on, and they played a Brahms string quartet. For the first time I knew what the word ‘grace’ meant. It came dropping gently on my head, through the music. My anger and sadness flowed out of me and were gone.

He said that I was very ‘touchy’. I said that this was true. He asked what he did, or was, that made him hard to live with. After a lot of thought I said it was his tendency to enjoy stressing the negative in everything that came up; that it made me very tired, as if I were dragging behind me a heavy bundle, ‘the vibe’. I notice that since this conversation he’s stopped snarling, whenever the phone rings, ‘Oh, who the fuck can this be?’

I think of my characters now as actual people. Their ‘paltry experiences’ have actually happened. I long to continue the slow, deliberate hacking of stone which will allow me to know their futures.

The book rolls forward at its own rate, acting as a black hole that sucks into it everything I think, witness, overhear and see on TV. Today, instead of trying to perfect each paragraph before I moved forward, I thought, ‘Fuck this! I’ll keep barrelling on.’ Hours passed in big bursts and I ended up with seven pages of stuff I could never have foreseen or invented. Reeled back to V’s with sore eyes and an empty head. This must be how it’s done—take your foot off the brake, unpurse the lips and see where it takes you.

A heaviness, around the heart. A heaviness in breathing. I keep running through details of the story, trying to ‘be him’ and ‘see it through his eyes’. Is it a vengeful story? Not as far as I can tell, in my present state of awareness. Does it give a complex picture of my relationship with O? Yes. Very. It goes through the worst of both of us, and the best of him. It was necessary for me to write this story. I remember asking Raymond Carver if there was any line he drew round parts of his life, or people he’s been engaged with, across which he would not go. He thought for a moment, very carefully, and said, ‘It’s my job to write down life as I see it.’ Pause. ‘It’s a jungle out there.’ Patrick White’s savagery. His utter ruthlessness. Chekhov, the women in The Darling and The Butterfly: do people imagine that he made up these terrible characters, from thin air?

The characters that people I know become when I write about them are, to me, almost totally separate from the people themselves, once I’ve finished the piece of work and put it aside, or published it. It’s as if I’ve extracted or borrowed from the real person the aspects of them that I needed to struggle with, and the character consists only of those aspects. I can return to the real person with no sense of overlap. Cold comfort.

It was a warm summer night and we talked for a long time without quarrelling. V said he had to have ‘an asbestos suit on’ in order to criticise my work. We came at this vexed topic from several angles, lying on our bed beside the open windows. I said, ‘I know I’m hypersensitive and unpleasant. But I’ve been trying hard lately to be more reasonable.’ ‘Well, it has got a bit easier, but I’m very wary of it.’ I tried to explain that I would readily accept his criticisms if only he would preface them by telling me whether the work had affected him, whether it had touched him in any way. He said he’d told me something in the book was ‘quite moving’. I think I would have remembered that, but maybe I’d had a moment of deafness; anyway I privately seized on ‘quite moving’, knowing it was all I could ever hope for. I said that I had a very high regard for him as a reader, and deeply respected his literary opinion, but that after his technical comments he’d never mentioned the book again. He’d dealt with it briskly, like an obligation, and buried it. I said that I kept hoping he might mention something that had stuck in his mind or made him laugh—but he never did. I said I was disappointed that he hadn’t been more…comradely. He listened, without interrupting. Then he said, ‘I would never expect you to respond to my work in the way you’re describing.’ ‘But I did. Didn’t I? When your book came out? I talked about it a lot. I said how much I liked it, I quoted lines from it, I remembered turns of phrase and things that were clever and funny—I enjoyed talking about it.’ ‘I do remember you being very nice.’

Oh, what’s the point of all this—saying it in the first place, writing it down later. I don’t know how we’ll be able to live together as writers. I can’t see a way, unless I drop all this craving for…what? These grudging crumbs he’ll drop in front of me if I pester him? I long for him to let me see how my work affects him. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it leaves him cold.

Last night, V sat beside me on the kitchen couch and took my bare feet on his lap and told me what he really thought about ‘Recording Angel’—that it was ‘a very strong story’, but that O would have been shocked to read a description of himself at his lowest, in hospital after that dreadful operation: to be revealed and scrutinised while in that state. I began to feel the horror of what I’ve done. I heard myself jabbering the same old justifications, how I thought I’d done this and what I’d meant was that, and it made me sick. I broke off mid-sentence and got up and walked over to the sink. He said, ‘What’s up, sweetheart?’ I said, ‘I’m sick and tired of myself, that’s all.’ He came and put his arms round me and gently kissed me. The awful truth is that no one can help you carry the consequences of your behaviour. You are required to carry them on your own.

Woman after woman, five of them in a few days, came up to me to say they liked ‘Recording Angel’. And each of them said a version of ‘It’s full of love.’ I’d better get used to this. Men see it one way, women another.

While I was cleaning the bathroom basin V came in and we had an interesting discussion. Leaning against the door jamb with his arms folded, he advised me that it was time for me to stop writing ‘about the 70s’. Oh? Why’s that? Because the 70s was a ‘period of bullshit, of clapped-out theories that Victoria is now bearing the brunt of.’ Apparently G shared his opinion; indeed he had told V that he’d already had ‘a little talk’ with me about it. I said we hadn’t spoken about this as far as I recalled. Shifting my energies to the bath, I pointed out that certain social changes had occurred in the 70s that people had been deeply affected by—that this could not be scrubbed out of either my characters or me, and that to attempt it would not make sense. I said that his work was coloured by different assumptions because his ideas were formed in a different era and through different experiences. I said that whenever I read him I felt that I was in the 50s. He said that much of his work was set in no-place and no-time. I said that it was in the relationships between men and women, and in the underlying assumptions about these, that period still made itself felt. He asked me what I thought about what he’d said. I said, opening the toilet lid and attacking the rim of the bowl, ‘I don’t think anything in particular.’ He pressed me harder. I said, ‘I understand the point you’re making. But I can’t say how it will affect me, until I sit down to write the next thing.’ I forbore to point out that in the simple fact that I was on my knees scrubbing the porcelain as we talked, and in the fact (which he had only the other evening admitted publicly without shame or remorse) that he has ‘never cleaned a lavatory in his life’, resided a thundering piece of…whatever it is we were talking about: a whopping great assumption about men, women and domestic labour which dates him, and judges him, as accurately as does any misplaced nostalgia that I have been reproached with.

‘I think you should learn the second Czerny,’ said my piano teacher. ‘They make a pair. You’ve been on the first one long enough.’ ‘Okay. I love boring exercises.’ ‘I’ve noticed,’ she said. ‘You must be looking for something deeper in the music. Something spiritual.’ We laughed but I wasn’t quite sure whether she was teasing me.

I’ve been offered a job reviewing movies for a monthly magazine. Out of the depths of my ignorance I take it. The editor, gossiping about a certain journalist, says, ‘Like all bullies and authoritarians, he’s very easily wounded.’ Later I report this to V. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that’s good, isn’t it. Did you, um, think it might apply to you? A bit?’ ‘Yes, I did,’ I said, hanging my head. And the more easily wounded one is, the more bullying and authoritarian one becomes. To protect the shivering chasm at the core.

At the Sydney International Piano Competition I sat in the second row where one can see the sweat splashing off their noses and chins and soaking the hair on the backs of their necks. I’d been in a mood for never hearing Mozart again, but a Frenchman played a rondo with such airy clarity and creamy smoothness that I nearly passed out. People in the audience become intimate friends with strangers. By the next session they have completely forgotten each other.

We walked along the creek this morning. Wind very sweet and balmy, a drying wind. High, creamy clouds, burst through by sheets of sparkling sun. The first spring-like morning. The green shoots clearer on every tree, and everything seems in motion, standing up to the wind in good humour.

The imagery V uses in ordinary speech, loaded with reluctance. ‘I’ll dump you off at work.’ ‘I said I’d cart her round the bookshops.’ ‘We’d better get rid of’ (i.e. eat) ‘those potatoes.’ ‘I suppose I’ll drag m’self into town.’ As if the ideal were stasis.

Janet Malcolm’s big New Yorker essay on the biographers of Sylvia Plath: boom! She shows me that the things I’m too timid to write can be written—that I should trust the stuff that my inner censor has been telling me to scrap. Meanwhile, in the New York Times someone reviews a book: ‘a model polemic, full of autobiographical detail, conversations with friends, family and colleagues, and debates the author has had with himself and critics.’ Is that what a ‘model polemic’ is? I think maybe I can do that.

G writes. He has been present at the birth of the baby, a girl with ‘long, splayed fingers: I think she could manage a tenth already, on a proportionately reduced piano. I’m dizzy with exhilaration and lack of sleep—exalted, absurdly happy. Is there a plan, Helen, or is it just women carrying on with life, civilising through that peculiarly feminine self-abnegating and unselfconscious love? In awe and wonder, your respectful friend.’

British Airways messed up our flight to Madrid and our English friends had to go on ahead without us. V handled the desk staff so brilliantly, never losing his cool, that he got us a refund for the whole trip, including the hotel, and we even still went, at BA’s expense, though not arriving till dinner time. Astonished and impressed by the patient charmingness of his negotiations. H: ‘We’ve really had a nice day, haven’t we, in spite of our visa troubles.’ V: ‘Yes, and it’s because I was in charge.’ I laughed; but we’re locked in an endless power struggle. When we see couples who are cheerfully loving we exchange sad, wry glances. I suppose he thought we would always be ‘in love’. My next task: to pick up at speed enough Spanish to handle the weekend here, without threatening his need to be seen as running the show.

Since my drunken fall in New York I have hardly any sense of smell. I read in Janet Malcolm about a patient of Freud’s whose sense of smell went away while she clung to unrealistic fantasies that her employer would return her love and marry her. I ask myself what my ‘unrealistic fantasies’ are, or rather, what I am declining to say bluntly to myself. And out it comes: ‘I regret having got married. I regret my loss of freedom.’ Okay. I regret it. But I also accept it, accept my regret, and decide consciously that I’ll try to stay married, and will make serious efforts to be more generous, less angry, less controlling, less reducing. I state to myself, too, that for all the faults I find in him V is a clever, funny, decent man who puts up with my craziness and tries to be kind to me. And that while there are thousands of ‘wrong’ men out there, there is no such thing as the ‘right’ man.

The harbour. I can hardly comprehend its constant differentness from itself. Today wide slow ridges, ten feet apart, move towards me at a slant and softly collapse against the low stone wall. Taking notes—this little discipline—is a defence against the blank wordlessness that overcomes me when I stand at the window and look at the water. Why do I feel I have to conquer this state, subdue it, flail away at it with my vocabulary? In fact it is a tremendous gift. A chance at the soul.

The adventurous beauty tells us about her lover in India.

V: ‘What are his good points?’

AB: ‘He’s deep, serious, moral…’

V: ‘What are his bad points?’

She hesitates.

H: ‘He’s deep, serious, moral?’

She laughs.

AB: ‘Exactly. He doesn’t much like to play.’