In the street we ran into a Labor MP I vaguely know. She teasingly asked V if he was giving me ‘plenty of support’ since my book came out. V passed it off with a quip but at home later he launched one of his rants against stupid, cliché-ridden, impertinent, presumptuous, offensive women. A heavy vibe filled the flat. After careful thought about my wording I asked whether there was any reason why her question had so violently got under his skin—did he feel perhaps that I hadn’t properly acknowledged how much support he had been giving me? My attempt at humility didn’t cut much ice. He said this hadn’t even crossed his mind, and that he was furious because I ‘didn’t give a shit’ about his opinions of her; I hadn’t even looked up from the paper. Finally I said, ‘All right. Next time I’ll pay more attention.’

The bad vibe is still hanging around, hours later. I don’t know what this is about; and I’ll never find out by asking V, because he doesn’t know either. He truly believes it’s about the politician.

The Age calls my agent, offering me ‘six figures’ for ten pieces a year, on anything I fancy. I say I’m happy at the Independent Monthly. The editor of the Australian summons me to his office. I go out of curiosity. He lolls behind his desk, I perch on a chair. Sums of money are mentioned, and a carrot: one day, he says smoothly, I ‘might even get to interview the prime minister.’ I stare at him, too amazed to say, ‘Is there anything in my work that makes you think I might be interested in interviewing the prime minister?’ Walking home I think, ‘He hasn’t read your work, you idiot, and he never will.’

I think I am in the classic position of a woman artist who in order to maintain a marriage is obliged to trim herself so as not to make her husband feel—what? Something a man is not supposed to have to feel? This must be one of the reasons V is so against it when I have to do publicity. It’s also perhaps why he is encouraging to me about doing journalism. He is as generous as he can possibly be about my book and its success, but if I had success like that with a novel there’d be serious trouble—I don’t know what trouble exactly, but life would get tougher. Why are men so fragile? If he were getting more attention than I was, everyone would be at ease, it would be seen as normal and appropriate. Tilt it, and everything gets unhappy and shadowy. Maybe it’s true then. A woman artist who wants to develop as far as she can needs to live alone. He is a better novelist than I am—he can handle broader ideas, more characters etc—this is not the problem. The problem is that my success seems to get in his way. It somehow stops him from working.

What to do? I could accept without further complaint his demand for uninterrupted occupation of the flat. Work harder at cooking. Do less publicity. Pull my horns in. How dismal.

The play was ‘splendidly written’, in that Irish style that half of me wants to relax and swoon into, while some drier, more English aspect of me draws back in scepticism: Look out, you are being seduced.

Bought myself a sewing machine at Grace Bros, a demo model which, the Brother consultant earnestly assures me, ‘only Vicki and I have ever sewn on’. Vicki (big hair, raking red false nails, missing side tooth, gold-rimmed specs) tells me the shop runs classes. ‘You learn to make a skirt with a zip, and a shirt with a collar.’ I lug it home, dizzy with ambition.

I try to behave with some sort of grace. I try to be pleasant and generous. But I actually feel I’d like to give up this draining attempt to be married, to go and live somewhere high and sunny, on my own. With the windows open. Yesterday my fantasy was to ask him if we could each write down a list of good and bad things about being married to each other, and try to talk about them and work them out. But I haven’t mentioned this idea because I know what his response would be—one of his incredulous laughs: ‘Why the hell would we bloody well do that.’

I get home from work late afternoon, loaded with food for tonight’s dinner, and find a note from V. He’s down in the park having a coffee with X the painter, do I want to come down? I conquer a surge of female martyrdom—How hard I work! How much money I spend! How little thanks I get! I get a grip, put on a record and set about cooking the meal. By the time he comes in I’m cheerful. He reminds me of a short trip we’ve been planning to the Flinders Ranges. His tone is so reluctant that I say, to let him off the hook, ‘You don’t feel like going, any more?’ ‘Aw, it’ll be all right, I s’pose.’ Does it come from his family, this tendency to take all the joy out of something in advance? Or is he just being ‘level’? Is it the weary struggle of writing his novel? Or is it me? Am I a bore? Am I distracted? What am I doing wrong?

I took Mum and Dad a copy of True Stories. ‘Errr,’ they said, looking at it with peculiar gingerly expressions. Dad said that the cover photo made me look old, and ‘didn’t do much’ for me at all. Then, while explaining to me how to sharpen a knife against a stone, he demonstrated with his blade across the smooth surface of my book’s cover, this chancing to be the flat object closest at hand. My niece and I shrieked about this later, but once more I’m winded by their ignorance of social forms—I mean, doesn’t one learn from life to say ‘Congratulations’? Whatever one might feel about the quality or significance of the achievement in question? Less and less do I understand them. They become more mysterious to me, with every passing year.

A woman with a racked, pointed little face tells me that her husband has fallen in love with one of his students and ‘it’s been hell all year’. They’re talking about selling their house, trying not to wreck things for the kids. Apparently he doesn’t want to leave, though: ‘He says he’s stopped seeing her, but he weeps and wails and says he can’t bear it.’ ‘Kick him out,’ I said. ‘You can’t live with that.’ The man wreaks havoc but lacks the guts to give the coup de grâce, so she has to do it.

V has been stewing over a remark the minister made at Robert Haupt’s funeral: ‘We should be glad that his tribulations are over.’ V said it was a ludicrous misrepresentation of Haupt’s whole approach to life. I agreed that it was a misrepresentation, but suggested it was an attitude integral to a Christian’s beliefs, which in his own church a minister has a right and perhaps even a duty to express. A fierce argument broke out. I retreated to the closed-in balcony where we eat (which V has from the day we moved in referred to, for some reason, as ‘the sewing room’), and sat at the table to sew a button back on my nightie. It’s nice in there, the cheesecloth curtains that I made puff and drop on a breeze. V walked through the room. Seeing me stitching away there he said in a soft voice, ‘Good room for sewing, isn’t it.’ I realised that to see me sewing, by hand or with the machine, releases in him a flow of feeling. While being touched by this I also secretly resolve to make use of it, if and when things get rough. I mean that I could sit down with a needle and thread, and bring about a lessening of tension.

Since I got back from Melbourne I’ve had to stay in bed with a horrible cold, coughing up brownish-yellow stuff. V’s gone to the gallery with X the painter. He mentioned with elaborate casualness that they’d had ‘a few coffees’ together while I was away. I realise that by getting sick I’m encroaching on his private daytime social life, which he so often and so strenuously denies the existence of. Yesterday he kept remarking on how ‘much better’ I seemed, and when I announced early today that I was going to stay in bed again he seemed surprised and taken aback. I suppose he’d already arranged the X outing. No suggestion that I might go. Oh hell. Should I pay attention to my instincts here? Can I be bothered letting jealousy develop? If you’re a man’s second wife you know for a fact that he’s capable of anything.

Opening at random Lichtenberg’s Aphorisms I note that V has put a mark in the margin beside this: ‘To excuse one’s own failings as being only human nature is, provided one has meant well, every writer’s first duty to himself.’ It is? I flip the pages, seeking more clues to his thoughts about himself. Feel as criminal as if snooping on a diary. A page corner has been folded: under it I read, ‘It is very charming to hear a foreign woman speak our language and make mistakes with her fair lips. Not so in the case of men.’

A manuscript by the music critic John Clare is studded with moments of electrifying power and beauty: Sydney’s ‘brassy, maritime light’; ‘a ferry walked on tiny spines of light’; two drunks wrestle in the Cross, and one stretches the other’s ‘cardigan a yard at least’; a man frenziedly about to fuck a girl in a dark lane sees over a fence, through a kitchen window, ‘four people gravely playing cards’. Gravely. I take off my hat to that.

I think I’m searching everywhere for a model, someone to show me how to write a book about my widowed sister and her rage and grief. I don’t know where to stand, to write the story. Is it even ‘a story’? Where to grab hold of it. Whether to build this not-knowing into the story, or to blast a way through the uncertainty and pretend (to myself, or to whoever I fantasise as reader) that I know what I’m doing and how to do it.

With a friend who is married to a painter I compared notes about our respective husbands and their demands. In his determination to deter visitors, hers has disabled the buzzer and made adjustments to the heavy street door of their house that make it impossible for her to get in, even with her key, without putting down everything she is carrying. Like me, she is expected to run the house, do the shopping and cooking, and keep the home fires burning, all this without being permitted on the premises during work hours. I saw in her face my unhappiness. We did not know whether, or how, we could go on tolerating their regimes, or what we could do to change them. When I was leaving she said, ‘I’m beginning to experience it as violence.’

H: ‘Let’s take out hospital insurance.’

V: ‘Why.’

Pause.

H: ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s agree not to ask each other why in that aggressive way. Could we avoid that tone? Do you think? For the New Year?’

V: ‘Why is one of the most important words in the language. It’s an absolutely crucial word. It’s a much better word than Let’s.’

Short silence.

H: ‘Do we have to be in competition all the time?’

He makes out he doesn’t know, can’t imagine what I mean. I point out his placing of why and let’s in opposition. He acts as if he’s amazed by this ridiculous suggestion.

I think he’s lying to me. I said, ‘If you don’t tell me you’re seeing her, if you sneak behind my back and I find out accidentally, it makes me feel mad. It makes me crazy.’ He appears to take my point. But in a darker area of my thoughts I’m remembering his declaration, made to me several times over the years, in various contexts, and always with a note of defiant eternal-verity-ness which I would have to describe as smug: ‘All men are moral cowards.’

‘Now that you’re starting to go to things,’ he said, on our walk this morning, ‘I was thinking that’d be a good time for me to see X. In the evenings.’ Whereas he once used to think, he said, that it was ‘ridiculous and wrong’ of me to get up in the night and sleep in the spare bed (because he snored! which is not mentioned), he has now begun to see that ‘separateness, for adults, is a natural and good thing’. If it weren’t for X, I’d be fine with this. But somehow I feel manipulated, roughed-up by him. As if he’s turning me against myself. You want separateness? I’ll show you separateness!

Still. I’m going to find a place in myself to stand, from which I can engage better with V. I would like him to know that I don’t see him and his inflexible regime as my only possible source of happiness.

And I’m determined that I’ll give this marriage the best I’ve got, without thinking about ‘flight’, till he finishes his book. I’m going to work hard at not wallowing and being abject. I’m going to tell him what I feel, and not in an accusing tone. I’ll keep on inviting him to ‘things’, and going to them anyway whether he comes or not. Plus, I’ll try not to turn X the painter into the mule to carry all this anger.

V has raised again the possibility of my buying a little flat, as a work space and for visitors to stay. (Renting is anathema to him: ‘money down the drain’.) Tried to stay calm. Asked him if he could see any other way of resolving our situation about the flat. I can’t remember what (if anything) he said. I have a pathetic, unspoken hope, or fantasy, that one day he’ll say, ‘Look, we can solve it all in one simple stroke: I’ll rent an office.’ So many times this suggestion has been blasted away that I know it’s never going to happen. He offered to speak to a real-estate agent for me, to a tax accountant. I’m being very firmly pushed. Horrid little spurts of fear.

Only a man distracted by love will get up from the dinner table and return with a single glass of water; will barge first out the heavy front door of the building and let it slam in his wife’s face. The sick power of knowing something he thinks I don’t know; of knowing that he’s lying to me. The clumsiness of the lies, the humiliation of being clumsily lied to.

The morning after the Frenchwoman’s visit, as we walked, he took up his railing against ‘self-obsessed people’. His particular bugbear is people who never ask him questions. I asked him whether he’d always found himself surrounded by such people, or if it was a recent development. ‘Oh, there’ve always been some, but there are more lately. And when I went to live in Melbourne and met your family, I really started to become aware of it.’ I said, working at not being ‘emphatic’, that I’d had a bit of an idea about this problem. I said I’d noticed that when he met someone new he would soon begin to ask them quite intimate questions. They, surprised, would reply; and then he, rather than offering corresponding information about himself and his own life, as most people do in the give-and-take of conversation, would push on with further questions (always intelligent and sensitive) into the other person’s territory. In this way the other was drawn into revealing himself, while V remained veiled, and thus, in the end, more powerful. This made him furious. He said I’d ‘shifted the blame’ on to him. I said I didn’t think I was blaming anyone. I said I was trying to examine the dynamic of the phenomenon that bothered him so much. He battered away, declaring that men’s way of conversing is ‘better and wiser’ than women’s, because it doesn’t ‘depend on subjective anecdote’.

I stayed a night with friends at Mona Vale. V wouldn’t come. Ashamed to be sleepless, to be in this much pain. And yet this is life. The toughness of life. People’s utter, bottomless selfishness. This is what people do. The fact that I’ve been faithful to V for ten years has no weight, in the big scales of what will become of us. No ‘virtue’, no ‘self-control’ can save us, or protect us from each other. We can’t make room for each other. We push each other into the most extreme versions of ourselves, and then with a gritty determination we fight.

Everything fine in our bodies, but no emotional contact. No eye contact, no sound, not a word spoken. He turned his head sideways on the pillow so as not to look at me. In a small rush of courage I took hold of his chin and gently turned his head towards me: ‘Hello? Are you there?’ He opened his eyes. I said, ‘Hello? It’s me. I’m here.’ ‘Eh? What’s the matter?’ ‘I had a feeling things were happening only from the neck down.’ We both laughed. He said, ‘Of course they weren’t.’ But they were.

The nakedness of strangers. Every time I go to the Korean Bathhouse I feel more free. I can gaze at the perfect, and differently perfect, bodies of very young women without envy. May as well envy a tree, or a rock, in its perfect ‘thing itself’-ness. And the older bodies flabby or scrawny—marked by child-bearing or overeating or heredity, or just the attrition of gravity—they move me too, with a comradely feeling of respect.

I offered to go right back and expunge all—or all unfavourable—mentions of him. He looked sceptical. I said it would be a distortion, but that I’d do it if it was necessary. I also offered not to mention him any more, except procedurally. I said it was the first time I’d had to make a decision between being a writer and being married. He laughed and said I was overstating it. I said I didn’t think I was. This morning we spoke further about it. He expressed his revulsion again, but said he felt ‘awkward’ about seeming to ‘demand self-censorship’ from me. He said I should write an account of this disagreement, and then continue to write as before. This to me is not quite right. But I don’t know what I ought to do instead.

It would be a ridiculous distortion not to write about him at all. There’s no way he’ll ever understand that writing about my life is the only thing that makes it possible for me to live it. I can’t (or won’t) give it up. And I won’t burn the notebooks or leave instructions for them to be burnt when I die: this last is where he’s putting the pressure on. Actually I feel real sympathy for him. It must be awful to know his life is being reported through my eyes. It would be awful to be married to me.

I rang up X and said I was sorry if I’d seemed ‘rude and cold’ to her on the phone. She was puzzled: ‘I didn’t think you’d been rude and cold?’ ‘Oh. That’s what V told me you’d said.’ We didn’t know what to say next. But wished each other well and hung up. This must be what G meant when he said he thought of V as ‘a manipulator; a spider in the middle of the web’.

I’m coming to see that he has no conceptual equipment—nothing that would help him to analyse a mess like the one we’re in. All he can do is repeat his statements of will and purpose. But when I calm down and start taking things apart, he listens to me and almost always agrees. Or appears to. Because what I say lets him off the hook. Of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Neither of us is a criminal. At those moments I have a powerful sense of myself as working.

We’re engaged in a bitter struggle to define ourselves, each against the other. He sets his face against things that have meaning to me; and my urge is to split hairs and demand exactitude. I suppose I’m just as unbearable to him as he is to me.

I’m dangling in the space between old customs and new ones I don’t know how to establish.

At lunchtime I take V to see the place. He says very little. I notice myself becoming anxious and disappointed: I want to drag a response out of him. I want him to like it. He withholds in obedience to some dark part of his nature. I keep control of myself: whether he likes it or not is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT. In fact, this irrelevance is part of the point of my renting it in the first place. Finally he says, ‘You can bring some of our old clapped-out cups and saucers down here.’ ‘Bugger that. I’m not putting anything in here that I don’t really like.’

Walking home from La Buvette.

H: ‘These sandals have turned out brilliant. Last year I thought, “Oh bum, they’re a lemon,” but suddenly they’ve gone all soft and comfortable.’

V: (glances down; grunts)

H: (mimics his voice) ‘Huh. Pity they’re so ugly.’

V: (with a cross laugh) ‘You bloody women! You always think you know what a bloke’s thinking!’

H: ‘No we don’t! We have to make it up! You won’t engage with us! You won’t answer when we speak! You present us with a blank face! We have to invent a response, out of loneliness and despair! So we won’t have to live in an emotional vacuum!’

He says he can’t talk to me any more, that I keep correcting everything he says, that I’ve got a list of subjects that I don’t want to hear about any more.

I say it’s because he never has anything new to say on those subjects, and only rants and fulminates—how boring young people are, the worthlessness of popular culture, the tedium of first-person writing. He says he experiences my response to this as censorship, and trimming. I say I can understand why he wants to spend time with someone fresh, who hasn’t heard all his opinions yet, who can admire him and be refreshed by him and look up to him, and be advised by him on what to read—the Stendhal, the Berlioz. His love of certain writers is new to her. He seems miffed by this.

Don DeLillo, interviewed by David Remnick in the New Yorker: ‘Between books,’ he says, ‘what happens is, I drift. I feel a little aimless. I feel a little stupid, because my mind is at odds. It’s not trained on a daily basis to concentrate on something, so I feel a little dumb. Time passes in a completely different way. I can’t account for a day, a given day. At the end of a day, I don’t know what I did.’ The work, when it starts, ‘comes out of all the time a writer wastes. We stand around, look out the window, walk down the hall, come back to the page, and in those intervals, something subterranean is forming, a literal dream that comes out of daydreaming.’

V admires a pair of grotesquely high heels that Marilyn Monroe is wearing in a photo. I look at them and see two instruments of torture. He speaks at some length about how women who wear high heels are showing that they like men, that they’re prepared to ‘put up with a bit of discomfort’ to please a man. They are much more feminine than women who wear flat shoes or runners.

He questioned me about why I was ‘a jealous person’, and what I thought jealousy was. I said it was a panic, a terrible fear of being rejected or replaced. I said that one of the things I loved in Proust was his brilliant, hilarious accuracy about jealousy and his intense interest in it. V said he thought there was far too much about jealousy in the book, and that what he liked was the ‘overarching’ shape of the book and its interest in time. He said that if he were a jealous person like me he would try to get control of it. I said I had worked hard to get control of it. He said, ‘What’s the evidence for this?’ I said, ‘The fact that you’re still walking around, for instance.’ He half laughed. I said I sometimes thought that if I were a man I’d be in jail. ‘What for,’ he said. I said, ‘For violence.’ This irritated him, and he said so. He said that I ‘despised the rational’ and ‘worshipped feelings’; that I ‘used’ feelings. I asked him if he thought there was anything about his personality that might also be contributing to our troubles. He went vague. I asked him what sort of person he thought he was. He replied that he thought he knew himself pretty well, that he had a clear view of what he was like; and even though some of the aspects of this were ‘not very good’, there was no point in trying to change them now, since there was little hope that people could change their basic nature. He said he thought he had a tendency to meanness, that he could be generous but that he tended towards the mean. He was ignorant about some things, disinclined to forgive, impatient. ‘I know I can be charming, but sometimes it’s a con job.’ He asked me once again, tipping his head back and staring down his cheeks, whether I thought he should ‘see a shrink’. I said that I would never try to persuade him to do it, that it had never occurred to me to suggest it to him.

I don’t know what look is on my face, during these horrible low-voiced conversations: on his, a blank stubbornness, mouth tight, chin up. He’s fighting me for his own survival, just as I am fighting him: for respect, and for self-respect, for a place to stand.

For three days we worked on the proofs of his novel. He read aloud, I wielded the pencil. I was once again impressed and moved by the book’s sweep, its intricacy, its flow of ideas. And also surprised by the way his imagination seems to dwell forever in the 1950s. His efforts to get inside a woman’s head—every now and then a convincing spark, then a weird impression of his impression: as if he imagines our minds as ‘vague’, ‘soft’, ‘drifting’, ‘spreading’. Up close to the texture of his work, I realise I understand almost nothing about him, and he understands almost nothing about me. We have no shared experience, it seems.

Eventually he admitted it. She had flown down to Melbourne after I’d left, he’d met her at the airport and they’d set out straight away. When I got home from the lunch party yesterday and found him all hot and flustered, he’d just dropped her off at her place. I flung myself on the couch and wept and howled, doubled up, holding a hanky over my face. He kept trying to get a grip on my arms and I kept shouting, ‘Don’t you touch me! Don’t you dare touch me! You lied! You lied!’ ‘I didn’t lie!’ ‘You did lie! You lied and lied! You lied all year! And five minutes ago you were still telling me she wasn’t with you on the drive! In the motel! At Gundagai!’

V: ‘I didn’t want to tell you.’

H: ‘Why? Why?’

V: ‘Because it would hurt you and make you upset.’

H: ‘For Christ’s sake! Nothing is worse than being lied to! No pain is worse than that!’

The bitterness and disgust, the self-disgust for having been a fool. I kept groaning and crying out, ‘I can’t bear this pain.’

I got calmer. He went out to the kitchen and got a cloth and began to clean up. I sat on the phone chair, slack and stupid, beyond speech.

Yes, he says at last, it had been an affair all along, though not sexual till very recently. I don’t believe the second part but at least I can breathe: I wasn’t mad, all last year. But the following day he claws back the ground he’s given, becomes proud and defensive and cold. He’s back in his concrete bunker and looks out at me through the slit, with a cool, appraising face. All he wants is to move along, to get to the bit where I cop the blame.

X: ‘Your marriage must have been in a very bad state. When did this begin?’

H: ‘I beg your pardon?’

X: ‘V has told me that you live separate lives.’

H: ‘That’s not true.’

X: ‘You told me he said I didn’t like you, and was not interested in you. I asked him. He said he had not said this.’

H: ‘He did say it. You must realise he’s telling lies to both of us.’

X: (stubbornly) ‘I trust what he tells me.’

H: ‘He has told lies to both of us.’

Her face sets hard. This must be her famous ‘independence’: she experiences no female solidarity. I see that she means business. I have no resources to deal with such a woman. I’m breathing hard, with one hand over my mouth.

I am beginning to see that you can’t numb yourself and step cleanly out of a marriage. You can’t just pack your stuff and walk out the door. There is no door. You have to dynamite your way out. Blast, burrow, crawl—and you have to let yourself keep on feeling it, every inch of the way.

In the sauna with the ship’s doctor. We get naked and talk, red-faced and dripping. She says stress can make your fingernails crack and peel, and your hair fall out. She parted from her husband five years ago. It took them ‘six agonising months’ to break up: ‘I didn’t want to live, at that stage.’ But once the break was made, ‘things started to go right for me. I’d been working against the flow of things for so long, and suddenly I was going with it instead.’ ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it,’ I said, ‘how much against-ness you can go on tolerating.’

He makes a concession. He offers to rent a place to work. ‘All I need’s a bare cell, whereas what you need is two bedrooms, and it’ll cost a bloody fortune. I could rent a place for six months and see how it goes.’ So staggered I couldn’t speak. After all these years he is talking about it simply as a question of logistics, and not as an attack by me on the very fibre of his innermost being. Later I recall that the last time he made this offer it was a lie. I also know that it’s come too late.

‘All the people who should be told have been told,’ he says. ‘Our friends are bored. They’re sick of hearing about it.’ Turns out he’s been going round telling them that we’ve hit a rocky patch, that I’m unhappy. Puzzled people keep ringing me up: ‘What’s going on?’ In each case, I learn that he has omitted to mention the third party.

I said, ‘Look, V. We’re married. We know each other. We know what’s horrible about each other. We don’t subscribe to each other’s myth. And the only way out of being known like that, if you can’t stand it, is to leave and find a new person. For a while they think you’re wonderful and believe in your myth, but then they get to know you too, and the same thing happens all over again. Anyway, don’t worry. I won’t be around much longer.’

He scowls: ‘What?’

H: ‘I won’t be around to bug you for much longer.’

V: ‘What a thing to say.’

H: (recklessly) ‘Well, that’s what you want, isn’t it?’

V: (indignant) ‘No! It’s not! If you found a way to stick around, it’d be really nice!’

My computer at St Neot packed up so I had to work at home all day. He actually brought me a coffee.

V: ‘Want me to make you a little snack?’

H: (amazed) ‘Thanks! Yes! I’d like that!’

V: (mimes a flinch, as if put upon)

H: ‘You did offer.’

V: ‘I can do it, if that’s what you’d like.’

H: ‘ “I can do it.” This is what you do! You make an offer, then when I accept it, you withdraw it. That’s your style!’

It was an illuminating moment. For me, at least.

‘Where life immures, the intelligence cuts a way out…The intelligence knows nothing of those closed situations of life from which there is no escape…Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy.’ —Proust, The Captive

I don’t know what she would make of this but here’s what I think happened: I wanted so much to be loved that I tried to turn myself into the sort of woman I thought I would have to be, in order to be lovable. In the process I falsified myself, lost part of my soul, made myself sick with swallowed rage; I connived, I enabled; and I allowed him to set hard into worse versions of the misogyny he already felt: the little tin god, the artist as superior being whose needs must be met, no matter what it costs or who pays.

In other words, it’s not all his fault.

On the couch. Why do I find it so hard to be happy? She suggests that pain is more familiar to me, that I gravitate towards it. We talk about the ‘desert’ in me, how V had reached it, no longer found what he wanted and needed, and turned away to another woman: how this was my part in what happened; and how I’m learning that there is a spring of water, if I can just find it in myself. Walking away from her house, I find I don’t remember which of us put these things into words.

The Polish philosopher, on the phone: ‘Let’s say you decided to leave V. What would be holding you back?’

Long pause. I walk through our life, as it were room by room. It is very bare.

‘In my heart I know I have to leave. But I’m hanging on. Because I’ve got this terrible need for him to tell me the truth. And because I’m scared.’

‘What of?’

Longer pause.

‘Failure. This is my third marriage. Fear of my failure to sustain intimacy. To sustain a relationship.’

‘Intimacy,’ she says, ‘has to go both ways. And the aim of a relationship is not to sustain the relationship.’

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.

‘So,’ she said. ‘He stirred us up against each other.’

I said, ‘It’s obvious that he’s in love with you, but he won’t say so. If he’d been able to say to me, “Listen, I love X and I want to leave you and go with her,” I would have accepted it. I would have been hurt and angry and sad but I would have accepted it. Instead he keeps saying he still loves me, and that he’s extricating himself from you and wants us to get through this.’

‘Do you mean to say,’ she said in a faint voice, ‘he never told you how he felt about me?’

‘No. I found out by snooping. All he’s ever said is that he likes you, that you’re a close friend that he likes to see.’

Enormous, endless pause.

At last she said, ‘So—all we’ve learnt is what each of us most feared.’

I said, ‘To me, the most destructive part of all this is how he denied and kept on and on denying—and is still denying—what I instinctively knew the truth must be. He’s damaged my faith in my own instincts.’

‘Oh,’ she said at once, ‘but that is what men always do to women. And I wonder if they have any idea of the damage it causes.’

Immense relief. Freedom, lightness, clarity. And thinking of V and his manoeuvres, a stunned, incredulous pity, even tenderness, as towards an oafish boy, a yokel, a creature barely evolved.

He’s still insisting, always in the same words, like a mantra, that X is ‘just a friend. A good friend. That I like to see.’

I’m never going to get a blessing from him. He’s never going to tell me the truth. It’s beyond him.

We went for a walk, early. Fresh morning: glossy water, tide high, clouds scattered, air spiked with perfumes from invisible flower-ing plants. We were both yawning. Coming up the steep part of Yarranabbe I said, ‘You know why we’re always tired? We’re exhausted from flogging a dead horse. Can’t you see it’s time we parted?’ ‘What? Just because I happened to run into X in the street when I was putting the rubbish out?’ I said, ‘Things between us are too fragile for something like that to have no meaning.’ It was nothing serious, he said, it was trivial; I was overreacting as usual, it wasn’t worth getting upset about, it wasn’t worth having all these feelings.

V says his old friend’s wife has told him she’d thought all along that I’d leave him. ‘And she said it’s because of your restlessness.’ Jolted by this, I call and ask her. ‘Yes. I did tell him you’d leave,’ she said. ‘Right back at the start. I couldn’t believe the shit he was giving you, and how long you went on taking it.’

And I am also learning that there’s a kind of man who believes he can have everything. He thinks he deserves both a wife and a girlfriend, and that everything will be fine and civilised, that he can become ‘really deep, strong friends’ with his wife, once she’s been exhausted by the struggle and dropped off, just so long as she doesn’t ask whether he’s still having the affair that finished off the marriage.

Well, yes, he is. Sort of. ‘I spend most of my time alone,’ he says. ‘I’m like you. I like being alone. I walk from room to room thinking about things. I miss you terribly, but at the same time I think it’s good for me to be alone.’

‘But you’re not alone, are you. You’re with her, and you’re still trying to make me think you’re not with her.’

‘Yes, okay, I do sleep with her, but eighty per cent of my time I’m alone. Being alone is the larger truth.’

In this flat, alone, I can at last see myself as a grown-up. I’ve moved a cane chair into the bedroom so I can survey my view. I sit there in the early evenings and contemplate it. At certain hours it looks almost Italian. One day I’ll be light-hearted again. I swear I will. I will work my way there.