JANUARY

1 Jan 1966. River Town.

I’ve written nothing for four weeks. Why not? I was waiting for something to happen. Plenty did, but none of it worth recording. Until.

Last night was the most beautiful night of my life. Pleasure is the transition from a lesser degree of perfection to a greater, wrote Spinoza. The pleasure was exactly in the transition.

I spent the day hunting down New Year’s Eve action. No events, no parties. There’s a dance at the Winter Gardens, but I don’t want to go alone. I called at Joan’s, but she’s in Sheffield. Which leaves Madge. I meet Mike in town, skinny, sundark and intense, back from Morocco, playing there with Davey Graham, different tunings, modes, other folk to knit into ours, interesting, I see his spider dancing fingers, say I’ll be in the King’s Arms at 8:30. Into Ed’s, Trevor and Helen, Eric and Barbara, side by side, complacently smiling, settled into their coupledom and family does, I flee. I walked for half an hour, my optimistic route (each has a mood), past our house, past phone boxes. Do I dare phone Madge? Not flattering at 5pm on New Year’s Eve. If she’s doing something she’ll be unbearably patronising, if she’s not and agrees, I’ll pay for it anyway. Into the cold phone box, unfamiliar perfume, stale air, my breath fogging the small panes as I rehearse, dial, ready to press the coin, hold my breath … “This call cannot be connected”. Phew. Damn. I cycle to Geoff’s, he’s at his girlfriend’s. I carry on to Sea Town, cycle slowly along the prom hoping to see one of the Sea Town girls, even slower past Madge’s family b&b – sorry, “Private Guest House” – ‘hi, what a surprise, I was just passing …’ no one. Home. Why not an evening at home? In fifteen minutes I’m dying of boredom. I eat, dress, and am in the King’s Arms at 8pm. At 8:05pm Cathy enters.

Or rather her face appears around the door, a round face, eyes anxious and searching until she sees me, relaxes, lights up even. She is about to hurry over when she remembers, stops, tosses her hair – a long blond wig!, opens her coat – a patchwork dress of famous paintings!! and poses as the cameras flash. Others stare, I applaud, she clutches her coat closed and hurries over, ‘that is so not me!’ ‘It must be, somewhere. Brilliant. A pint?’ Later she says, ‘I almost didn’t come out.’ ‘Me neither.’

We hardly know each other. An art student, interesting-looking, I’ve seen around, a couple of passing conversations, each time cursing myself for not asking her out on New Year’s Eve. Drinks finished, a question, an answer, and we’re heading for the bus station, hand in hand – a new hand, each a memory bank – and on the bus we fill in. She’ll graduate this summer, then teach part-time, give herself five years to crack it, if not, ‘teach full time in a girls’ school, the spinster art teacher, with her knitting, her cats and her failed dreams,’ sad face, not entirely facetious.

The evening is the perfect rainbow curve, midnight the zenith. Neither of us goes to dances, is in touch with pop music, so that, fresh, it flowed over us in a sparkling, multivalent tide, with occasional breath-stopping stabs of emotion. We settled into the pattern: sit, drink, chat, with art school friends, cycling club friends, new acquaintances who graciously include us; then dance, energetically, then in melting embrace, then strictly formal; onto the balcony, to kiss and hold, feel new bodies; then quietly survey the crowd below – Madge with an unsuitable pick-up – kiss some more, her lips soft, uncertain: the grand tarantella approaching midnight, the falling balloons, cheering, and then the unexpectedly moving crossing of arms, hands linked, Auld Lang Syne, and into the New Year. More dancing, drinking, embracing, and then making plans. Someone knows a party, we share a taxi back to River Town, the party house is dark. I take her to our house, lights out, my parents in bed, into the front room, onto the settee in the electric fire glow. But instead of the usual fumbling, grappling urgency, we lie quietly in each other’s arms, eyes roving over the other’s face, absorbing each other’s tenderness and strength, very close, happy. I walk her home through scuds of showers and a wild West wind, “Chimes of Freedom” in my head, up to her tiny house, where she lives alone with her mother, high above the town. At the door I hold her, kiss her, thank her for a perfect evening, she doesn’t understand when I say that we mustn’t spoil it by seeing each other again, so that each holds its perfection in our memories, in our hearts. I stride heroically down the hill, then run, a cavalry charge, into the wind.

2 Jan 1994. Hill Town.

I bought a plant for Stella. She comes at 2:30, says there’s something wrong with her car. We talk and cuddle. She says she’ll think about staying overnight. We go out to the car. The oil filler cap is missing, oil has sprayed everywhere. I cycle to the Esso shop on the Level, nothing, they say try Braddick’s in Bellingham, three miles, they close at five, it’s 4:40. I get there at 4:55, cycle back up the hill with filler cap and oil. Stella is amazed at what I’ve done, unused to it. We fix the car and she goes home to feed the kids.

She phones, says I don’t want to go to Dora’s party, I’ll get some Indian and we’ll spend the evening together. Fine. Phones again, a call from Dora checking she’s coming. I say it’s typical Dora, she won’t even notice you, she just wants as big an audience as possible, but if you don’t go, there’ll be payback, not worth it, go. She says thanks for not pressuring me. She calls in before the party, we drink wine, she says she’ll come after the party but won’t stay the night. I check myself from trying to persuade her, feeling remarkably (for me) unpossessive.

I watch La Boheme, delightfully done, the Bohemians as sixties’ tricksters, listen to Monteverdi’s Vespers at midnight, glorious. At one I come upstairs to write. Stella arrives at 1:30. The party was the usual, an event staged for Dora’s benefit that she doesn’t carry through on. Jane, Jim and Tom were there. Okay, she says, that’s my duty done, big grin – now let’s enjoy ourselves. We dance to Tina Turner’s Foreign Affair, ‘Simply The Best’, talk with Stevie Wonder’s Hotter Than July playing, what a good fit this old music is for us. We lie on the couch, at peace. She says, let’s go upstairs.

In my bedroom, the new bedding and bedside lamp, a wonderful vision of Stella perched naked on the side of the bed, like the Little Mermaid, lit from the side, unfastening her necklace with rapt concentration, head down, busy fingers, her dancer’s body still, the pattern of light and shade, her smooth domed belly, looking like she must have at seventeen, releases the catch, cups the necklace and pours it onto the bedside table like sand, pauses, looks at me with the delight of a triumphant child, holds out her arms. We make love. I come. I say, what about you? She says, when I know you better. We talk, we snooze, she in my arms deliciously, how lovely she feels, how at ease.

At 4:30 she says, I must go. I make tea, we sit in bed in tee shirts, talking. About everything. My done-up bedroom is newly magical, with the new print of Primavera, my desk and daily writing now up here, an alchemical place where mysteries may be woven into the fabric of life, like gold thread into satin.

We have to scrape ice off her car. I say, the neighbours will look out and say, what a shame she has to go to work on a holiday, how good of him to come down and help. I see her off, return to bed with tea. Wonderfully warm, there is a gentle radiance inside me, I feel very well, and entirely at ease.

She rings at one. She got in after her son, the first time. She sounds fine. I feel fine. A feeling not in my heart, but my solar plexus. The heart, “is linked to higher consciousness and unconditional love”; while the solar plexus, “is associated with the emotions, where astral energy enters the etheric field.” I understand. I go for a walk.

3 Jan 1977. London.

Consecrate to the new year a comforting journal, stitched and bound, inviting its disposition when filled on a shelf of identical journals, to take its place, this segment of time, this record of thoughts and events, as the commentary and index to my life. Three days late.

Once my journal was to be a record of ‘reality’. At a time when ‘real life’ was ordinary, banal, lacking any distinction or quality, so that all I sang was – Is this all there is? But when I’d already had ‘experiences’ that were so beyond the ordinary – the moment the string snapped and I was alone, Mont St-Victoire, A New Year’s Eve, perfect moments, peak experiences, heightened awarenesses – that rather than special events in this world, they seemed to be experiences of a ‘more real’ world beyond; as if they had entered through sudden tears in the fabric of this world, that quickly knitted up.

I hoped that by consciously focussing my mind and emotions on recording the ‘ordinary’ I could register the real beyond the phantasmagorical, distill the eternal from the temporal, fix (like a photograph) the transient, see the absolute in the relative. And the early ones – ‘did I not once sit reality on my knee and …’ etc – in that crazy first year of journal writing, do have that quality of unmediated honesty.

But now everything is ordinary. No glimpses, no moments. It is like not being in love. How unused I am to not being in love – the spark from a girl seen once, the flame of infatuation for one just met, the warmth of feeling for one long known, not seen in years. I loved Jane, and let her fill my world. I no longer love her but still she fills my world. She was a bright moon in a firmament of stars. I let her love for me and mine for her draw us ever closer, until she covered, blocked out the stars, and now the inert surface fills my view.

I wake each day bewildered, lost. I wake up and begin to create myself. By putting myself into situations and seeing how I react, gradually through the day I build a simulacrum. It reaches its most finished state – is almost someone – in the evening, with a joint and music and dreams. And dissolves in the night.

So, the ordinary.

4 Jan, 1998. Hill Town.

The storm beats around my wood-lined attic room, rain sharp on glass, muffled on slates, rattling around my heaving boat, head into the wind, storm tossed, always the hope of landing on that island, not a Ulysses, or even a Crusoe, just a single seed, on sand, to grow myself. Except there is no island, no land, as Nietzsche tells us; only the sea, the Dionysian, is real; all the rest, including the boat, is fabrication, illusion, imagination, get used to it. “The raft encumbers. He slips into the water, swims on”. A flash of lightning, the thunder heavy, as if weighed down by the storm. The rising wind shaking leaves, then twigs, then branches, then whole trees, working them free like teeth to crash them over with torn roots. Everywhere the water rising, filling, covering, shiny zinc reflecting the sky. It flows down the empty streets in neat twists and braids, gathers into thick plaits, sweeps over blocked drains, endless rain.

Yesterday I went to Bournemouth. Into Habitat, which still for me represents aspiration. Our contemporaries, with two graduate incomes, filled their first houses from Habitat. We, already swerving, bought second-hand, raided skips and repainted, our one Habitat purchase a metal-framed sofa-bed in red corduroy. Then, with two rising incomes our contemporaries moved on – to Heals? Department stores? Restored antiques? And now, with thirty years of work on the clock, they are beginning to take well-funded retirement. And I am a postman, with years to do. Should I buy something? No, aspiration gone. I do my necessary shopping in cheap store sales.

I have tea and a scone in the department-store tea room, top floor, high above the town, big windows darkening to mirrors. And, as ever in these places, I ponder. Those who move through life on an upward trajectory, build their lives piece by piece, accumulating, all of a piece, so unfaltering that it looks like destiny; yet claim they are just doing what’s expected of them. I want to ask – by whom? But it would be a nonsense question. I envy not their lives but their unquestioning acceptance. And those, like my mother, for whom this is a treat, almost a retreat, the pot of tea, the cake eaten carefully with a fork, slower and slower, every crumb picked up by the pressed tines, gazing through the mirror windows to – where? I never knew, but feared her loss to it, insisted, frightened child, in drawing her back, next to me, for her eyes to focus once more on me. A one-armed man has ordered steak and chips. I leave before he starts.

Onto the sand, my multiple shadows from the promenade lights, the shadows of small stones and sand ripples, the wind sweeps fine sand over the rippled surface like a mist, the waves’ white tops are coloured orange, the wildness of the waves, the stars rushing through streaming clouds. I touch the sea. How do I feel? I don’t.

Helen came on New Year’s Day, passing through from her cousin’s. She arrived at two. We had sex on the faded red corduroy. Tom called and I collected him from his New Year’s Eve party, took him to Jane’s. Helen and I ate the Cranks moussaka I’d made, drank two bottles of Cava, played the Rolling Stones, kissed, took off each other’s clothes, her lovely large body, her long nipples, danced naked in front of the coal fire, sweated, did things she’d never done before, she driven not by passion but curiosity, a new experience, something learned. On the soft rug my head between her legs, tongue working inside her, my cock in her mouth, she sucks, almost gags, sucks on. Afterwards asks, does that mean I’ve done sixty-nine?, an inquiry. What if I’d come in her mouth? She’d have managed it in her professional way, well that was an experience. She is happy for me to come inside her, urges me on, dismisses any notion of her coming. She uses her body, at times wonderfully (and artfully), but is detached from it, it’s something she employs. A lawyer, used to detachment. At 54, rather than new passions experienced, these are events ticked off.

She can’t settle in bed, goes into the other room. I rush my round, driven by images of her bed-warm, sleepy, nipples pushing through thin nightdress, I’m back by 8:30. She is already up, dressed, the beds made, the pots washed, and breakfast laid, life compartmentalised, ‘good round?’. She is gone by 10. What a passion I have for her!

5 Jan, 1999. Hill Town.

That’s all the time I can give to recuperation. I’d need a month in bed to feel better. Now I have to get on. I fell ill on Christmas eve, since then, lots of time off, lots of time being ill. And now little better. And always depressing this time of year, the Christmas cards with notes from friends established in their cumulative lives – just checking, phew, he’s still a failure – reminding me of the exhausting nature and futility of what I do.

I forget that to be a writer is to be different, that there is a disjunction between the artist’s life and the non-artist’s, that being an artist involves a neglect of quotidian life. I forget this, and then blame myself for being unable to live the accurate life that one of my intelligence, nous etc ‘should’ be able to live. Because too much of my attention and ability goes into the art thing to be able to live such a life. I forget the process, the procedure that goes into writing a poem, the time and effort spent going to and living in that place where writing gets done, of being off-line in one life to be on-line in the other; and the effort in coming out of it. I go into a room and close the door, and the room is all that can be imagined. Which I must then bring into being. “The only realism in art is of the imagination,” writes Williams, which he follows with, “In isolation one becomes a god.” How Jane hated me going into that room! Because I was inaccessible. And because, there, she was not herself. For she relied so much on me, her relationship with me, for her sense of self. The perfect wife not to marry. And opening my front door onto the street after a writing session, I often don’t not know which town I will step out into, River Town? Textile City? London? and have to shake myself into a simulacrum (how approximate sometimes!) of the one this smiling person, ‘hi, Chris!’, greets. And blame myself for my neglect of that life. And forget each year how hard is this time of year.

This today in William Carlos Williams: “But though I have felt ‘free’ only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held firm at such times, yet being of slow understanding I have not always been able to complete the steps which would make me firm in the position. So most of my life has been lived in hell, a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when poems such as this or that would appear.” There is more. Read it carefully. Live with it. Tell myself, there are others like you, for whom the ‘given world’ is unstable, provisional, for whom reality is behind the façade which is ‘real life’ for many, most people. A façade not like a curtain, in front of, but a knitting together, a connecting of disparate and separate elements, of distinct natures, into an appearance of continuity, a comforting collective and agreed-upon illusion, even delusion – ‘do you not see …!?’ I cry, etc.

What I have to accept is that it is hard, continuously hard, because there are so many balls I have to keep aloft before I can even begin to do my work.

And being ill I feel old, and I’m terrified of not being able to feel any more.

And the terrible absence of Vicky, entirely lost without her.

Today, a little better, thoughts of other women, of the poetry group, thoughts of the unknown, the empty air I stare into, not as dissolution but opportunity.
W.C.Williams, Collected Poems vol 1, p198, 203

6 Jan, 1970. Textile City

I walked home. Except on the bus routes the snow has frozen to an ice rink. The night is clear as glass, hard as steel, the stars cold dagger points. The roadside cars are wrapped up. Against the pure snow the man-made world looks ill-designed and jerry-built. There is a shocked stillness.

Dave came over and we had lunch. I talked and talked, trying to explain what I meant about leaving the Planning Office. Afterwards he says that he doesn’t understand half of what I say but I speak with such assurance that I must be right. Oh dear, my dreaded plausibility. And I curse my talking, because I also say that so much mustn’t be talked of, especially in our ‘rationalist’, ‘objective’ way, because it fixes what should be fluid, turns the ever-changing to stone, Medusa’s gaze. I say we must get past waiting for the sign, the call, inspiration, instead push constantly against the sides of one’s world, one’s being, to see what gives, in what direction. I say I used to see our situation as having been shot by the rocket of education out of our world onto an alien plain where, if we didn’t take our allotted railway track into the future, we wandered, looking up labelled valleys, into signed woods, to choose between. And then, once entered, be once more enveloped by, absorbed into, lose oneself in. Freedom as time out, time between.

Now I see each of us as the centre of a web, a network that we are never out of, which we can explore, push into, move one’s centre within. We can, like pseudopodia of an amoeba, push into different parts of the network, but we are always within, one’s self must always feel at the centre. Dave sees leaving the Planning Office as taking a break from a situation he’ll return to, rested and renewed. He’s already making notes to prep his return. After Whitby, I say, I feel the only reason to leave is if it’s crippling, misshaping something fundamental in oneself – ie distorting the network in a harmful way. Therefore mustn’t be stayed in. He imagines the hang-ups, bad scenes, inadequate aspects of his life will fall away, and he will be cleansed, purified. I say you always take yourself with you. And even if you are renewed, you’ll be returning to a sullied environment, a clean body between dirty sheets. He believes everything will come clear, he will have a new perspective. I say clarity, perspective come not from getting out of, but from coming through. But I don’t know what I’m talking about.

I walked home from John and Pete’s new flat. They’re turning the basement into a stereo room, Led Zeppelin and Ten Years After booming. Talking to John about how, from the outside, they, the gang, seemed last year to be living unfettered, carefree and fun. But he talks of the tensions, the problems, the breakdowns. They are trying to create a way of life without help, no parents, no given (or acceptable) standards, no ideals, first-generation graduates from working-class homes. And so often their world is stimulating and warm. They need each other – why do I exclude myself? – because their peer group is all they have. And they are creating an admirable, mutually-supportive world. Which I guess is why I exclude myself.

7 Jan, 1976. London.

I wake, my veins lymph-filled, no red corpuscles, not a trace of iron, beside one who is more inert, in a borrowed bed in the cold front room of friends with lives. Lost. When everything is plausible, nothing is real.

First day with Manpower, 81p an hour, fitting office furniture at the Electricity Council on Millbank. Bill, anonymous, gets on. Harry, more wayward, does just enough, talks all the time. Travelling to Oxbridge on a job, he sets off 5:30, arrives 7, 2 hours fishing before work. I imagine him by the sluice-gates, misty expanse of Pelham’s Piece, familiar outlined buildings, the city coming to life, cars, buses, bicycles, I cycle past on my way to lectures, my future laid before me in yellow brick, he just a workman fishing. ‘It’s nice, away from the missus, a bit of peace.’ His friend combs Thames mud. 120 clay pipes. An iron weapon. ‘Could be a dagger. Or Excalibur. I dunno.’ The dagger in Marlowe’s eye.

To the Tate at lunchtime. Van Gogh: I see each daub of paint applied, as it’s applied, his staccato, compulsive, directed dabs, the timelessness of the ever now. Cézanne: the stillness of every mark in place; it could be no other; approach it and time ceases; look deeper, into the quivering vibration of perfect placement; and deeper, the still place between moments of time. Air bubbles to a drowning man.

Back to work, the task now routine, no one works hard. Descend into the sea of thoughts. We are born from, cast out of, all-knowing, into part-knowing, changed from energy to matter (painful change), granted one power (quality? ability?) – self-consciousness, with which to negotiate the duality of self and other (all else), to learn to live with solitariness, to fashion form and narrative. Make oneself fit. At what cost. “How often must one feel, as one looks back on his past life, that he has gained a talent but lost a character!” (Durrell.) Exactly. And I’m still resisting the change. “I begin to see an object only when I cease to understand it,” (Thoreau.) Yes. Or seek ways back to, on to, experiencing, again, the all-knowing. We will be initiated at the School of Meditation tomorrow evening. Or it is all in my head, my experiencing is my creation, and I should have the character to live there? “I find the actual to be less real than the imagined.” Read more Thoreau.

As the doors of the tube train open before me, cavernous mouth, I say, ‘sorry, Jane, for dragging you through this, for taking your youth.’

Blood on the Tracks. Isn’t it all in that? 

Gail, Fred’s partner, reading “Ten Thousand Facts You Always Wanted to Know”, says, ‘William the Conqueror on first meeting his future wife expressed his feeling for her by hitting her and rolling her in the mud.’ The idea excites her. She is short and round and soft. She looks exactly like the girl who broke Fred’s heart, but without her character. At a party she stood close to me, perfumed, looking up with big brown eyes, said, ‘we must have a cuddle some time,’ and drifted off. Nothing ever happened.
Durrell, ? p43, Thoreau Journals p12, 23, 22.

8 Jan, 1986. Hill Town.

To John and Dora’s, to support John. Dora swooning histrionically with a cold, Lynn pettish, Tony aghast, as if he’d been struck with a sock full of sand. The kids wandered around disconsolately, beneath the cloud of conflict and tension between the adults, in their own terrain, hunting around in their own small world for solace, comfort, and something to do. Sometimes one reached up into the stratum of the adult world, or was reached down to from it, with inevitable hurt hands and sore hearts.
The rain fell, and it was like being in an ark, of sighing adults and fretful children, as the rain pebbled onto the plastic roof of the conservatory, and the earth became saturated and the water rose and the ark shook and suddenly was free, and the children shouted, ‘Hooray, an adventure!’, and the adults, woken suddenly out of their dreams of freedom, cried, ‘Help, we are marooned, and all at sea!’ How soon we lose hope and the optimism of adventure.

I escaped with John to another room and he opened up a little, more than he had at the Men’s Group. It’s an odd situation. He and Dora are both painters, he is by far the better, but it’s she who has a gallery. Helped by an affair with an art school principal when on a course, yes, but retained because her work is easy on the eye without being obvious, and she’s happy to adapt to the gallerist’s demands, produce at the required rate. And she likes her work selling, enjoys the private views (is good at them, comfortable in the company of buyers because she comes from that class), the spotlight on her, having a reputation. Whereas John is reluctant even to exhibit. As if being on display, being seen by so many people who do not understand, the casual, uncomprehending eyes, sullies the work. But, too, a working-class kid from Hull, first generation to art school, and then the Royal College, never quite in his depth, hypersensitive, caught between the marvellousness, sometimes, of what he makes (and the feeling that goes with it, of being incomparable), and the class thing. And without a community, egotism is the only source of power, that keeps one going. He is simple, even naïve, but he has an astonishing capacity for concentrated attention, on what someone’s saying, and especially on the seen, and detailed remembering, as if it’s unscrolling before him as he speaks. He talks of Cézanne painting a portrait, working on it every day for three months, then asking the sitter, the client, what he thinks. Perhaps the left hand could be changed slightly? Cézanne, great bear, stands, not moving, says, as if stating the obvious – but if I changed the hand, I’d have to repaint the whole canvas. Flees the house, Paris, abandons it as a failure, and now it’s regarded as one of his finest portraits. Of his many paintings of Mont-St-Victoire, ‘you see, if he painted the mountain, and then moved his head two inches to one side, it would be a different view, presenting different problems. He started each time from scratch, as if he’d never painted it. The ultimate knowing naïve.’ He talks of Greece, his trips there, living there for long spells, of times alone, of moments. One day walking seven miles through scrub and dust, in the cicada-vibrating heat of the day, towards a village on a bay by the sea, imagining each step the glass of water he would drink, the swim in the enclosing water. He arrived and looked down into water so deep and transparent it looked like green glass. In the centre of the bay was a craggy cone of rock, white and pink and ochre, in patterned detail, rising from the solid sea. At the top a boy, tousled black hair, olive body, naked, very still. ‘I looked, paralysed, in time suspended.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I had wandered unthinking into a world beyond my comprehension.’ The boy dived out, and down, spinning like a spindle, into the solid sea, and down into John’s heart. Heartsick he turned and stumbled away, walked seven miles back, through scrub and dust, the glass of water, the swim forgotten, fell into his bed and slept for twelve hours. ‘Eventually the paintings came.’ And I’m tortured again by the tragedy for me that I have written, not painted.

9 Jan, 1991. Hill Town.

Dear Helen
A Janus letter.
First, looking back.
To a Christmas card, unsent, and a Christmas present, ditto, and a New Year greeting from today, all herewith enclosed.

Now to your questions:
Our first meeting – how different our memories! But would pooling them be an innocent pleasure, or a dangerous indulgence? I’ll go with the latter and move on. While sharing a vivid memory with you, of us walking up to Packett’s Park – hand in hand, of course – talking nonstop about our imagined futures.

Old age – I’ve second-guessed every possibility from sagely fame to poverty-stricken obscurity. Always, significantly, alone.

My time alone at Whitby showed me that I wasn’t ready to be alone in Whitby. But it confirmed me on a path, however faint at times. And in a Whitman view of what each of us contains. I saw the moon on the sea at midnight and rushed to my flat to paint it. I learned what fog is. In the silence of solitude I heard the chattering of others’ voices in my head, and resolved not to move until the voices fell silent. I bought you a candle in the shape of a candle, flame and all. You told me you had met a whirlwind and he was carrying you off.

Blocking? We too often engineer ourselves into relationships that block us from what we want, need, and should really be doing. Whatever, the fundamental relationship to resolve is that with our parents.

Thank you so much for your letter, unexpected, and for reaching out of your world and, however tentatively, into mine.

Now, looking forward.
I have a son who I hurt deeply and for whom I must find a way to justify myself.
I have an ex-wife with a busy life who after twenty years cut me out of her life like dead wood and grafted on a clone, without breaking step.
I am in a relationship of remarkable quality.
I have friends whose friendship I am consolidating and deepening, and a circle I am broadening.
I sleep well at night and wake refreshed in the morning.
I do tai chi.
I remember things I’d forgotten, which I regret having forgotten.

What will I do? I don’t know. I will stay here until it happens. Except that of course it is happening now. I’ve always presumed I would do something special in my life, while doubting whether I have the talent, energy, desire or nerve to actually do it. And a parallel belief that inhabiting our own space and place and time to the full is all the good there is. Faust and Buddha, side by side.

I have a week’s holiday in spring, and imagine cycling up to visit you. Write when it’s right to write.
Thanks again
With all good wishes.

10 Jan, 2003. Hill Town.

To the hospital at 5. Mum is now in a room on her own. She is very anxious, seems to be looking at something, seeing something. Death? Her life? She’s unsettled, keeps saying ‘oh’, but can’t articulate anything. I tell her I love her (the first time ever), we hug, she says, ‘oh’, looks keenly into my face. All I see is her large, pale, hooded eyes – not confused, exactly, but unreadable, opaque. I try to talk of good things. She’s bothered by the bad things – ‘we had a falling out’, as if we had fallen apart, when it was my withdrawal. I realise the pain of that withdrawal. Maybe I needed it, to survive. As Tom does from me. But now I know the pain. Her arms are in the air, one hand a hovering claw, the other vertical, the hand clenched. Little finger movements, like beckonings, an urgency, ‘oh’, but nothing follows. Her mind has separated from her body – trying to drink, she can’t anticipate the cup, or move her hand towards it, as if she’s fearful of it, what it will do. When I mention her clenched hands, she looks at them as if they aren’t hers and can do nothing about them. I say Malcolm and I are good, we’re honest. She says, two wonderful sons. She wants a pee, so I call the nurse. When I come back in she’s more settled, her arms under the blankets, she’s lying back. Perhaps the nurse turned up the diamorphine drip.

The conversation with Doctor Townsend two weeks ago. He said, ‘I don’t want to move to opiates while she’s reasonably comfortable, they’re the big guns, and there’s no going back from them.’ He checked the X-ray – half a lung is blank, flooded with effusion. ‘We could aspirate, draw off the liquid. But it needs an expert, so they’d take her to Yeovil, but not to stay. It’s a testing procedure, and would delay things by a week or two.’ He said, ‘we need to plan the end,’ looking up, checking as he goes, on my feelings, on what I know of mum’s feelings, on how much I know about end of life. He decides. ‘If the effusion builds up so she has difficulty breathing, we’ll put her on a diamorphine drip. It jets a small amount of the drug into her system, she will feel comfortable, mellow, will float away on a cloud.’ I said, ‘yes’, aware that I was agreeing at some point to killing my mother.

She is haggard, her mouth a ragged O. She suddenly wakes, says, ‘I was halfway there.’ ‘Was it alright?’ ‘It was lovely.’ She sleeps. I say to the young staff nurse, ‘she’s settled, but I don’t want to leave her, I have a feeling.’ She says, ‘you can stay, no problem.’ I watch her. She keeps almost stopping breathing. The older staff nurse says, ‘they go for ages without breathing. Go home, phone us, we have your number.’ I realise I want to be there at the ‘dying gasp’. But realise that’s from voyeuristic as well as personal reasons. But with dad having slipped away, it seems important. I leave at 8.

I see Kate. She looks rough, down at heel. Do I need someone? No, I need space. As always. And I realise that the feeling about mum isn’t fearing not being there when she dies, but wanting to be with her all the time. Oddly, I imagine lying beside her, holding her as she fades, keeping her safe in strong arms as life ebbs, as the door opens. She fears passing through the door. Maybe in fear that as a ‘bad person’, who’s done lots of ‘bad things’, ‘wrong things’ (and was there ever one more innocent than she?), she will go to hell. Or maybe it’s simply the fear that when she goes through the door, it won’t be over. I noticed her big ears. And that her hands, always red and chapped and work worn, are now soft, like a child’s.

11 Jan, 2003. Hill Town.

Mum died last night. I didn’t check the time – it must have been about 6:45pm. Doctor Townsend phoned at midday to say mum had been distressed and he’d increased the dose of drugs. At one the nurse phoned and said she didn’t think mum would last long. I went in at 2.

Mum was lying on her back, mouth open, breathing evenly but hoarsely, gargling in the throat at each breath, working hard to breath. She looked very old. In fact she looked dead. Like the old lady in the glass coffin in Greece.

What did I do through the afternoon? I guess I was just with her, her hand was smooth, the skin on her forehead, yellow and grey, was smooth. The nurse said, have a sandwich while we sort her out. As I’m eating she comes back and says, she hasn’t got long. They’ve changed her position so she’s lying down, head to the right, mouth hanging open but less gargling, eyes open but sightless. The breaths come less frequently, almost stop. Stop.

No sense of anything changing, no last sigh, no death rattle, just a cessation, her breathing had stopped, and life had absented itself. Suddenly this was a corpse, subject to different laws, rules, those of decay. I was close to her, stroking her hair, her eyes open but sightless (were they?), troubled, as ever in life, saying all sorts of crazy stuff, I love you, thank you, thank you for everything, you’re going to a better place, it’s okay you can go now, I can feel the wings sprouting, oh angel I can feel you flying, flying. And then she was gone. I kissed her mouth, I kissed her head, a strong smell, a mixture of hair, skin and perfume – what from? (The nurse? Nice thought.) she reminded me of the hetaerae in Rilke’s poem, ‘They lie in their long hair, and the brown faces have long ago withdrawn into themselves.’ She was like someone from a grave. I wanted her to be dressed as a princess, with all her finery and possessions – that would be the way to go! I know now what should be the how of death.

I sat and looked at her. As I’d looked at Tom when he was born. In him was all potential. In her was all the past, the events, the history of the world to that point. As if by contemplating her I was encompassing the whole history of the world. Her going was – an absenting of herself, a backing out of the limelight, off the stage. I felt mildly euphoric. Why? Because now the road ahead was clear. What does that mean? No longer a responsibility? Like the end of a relationship, the first sensation is relief, only later comes loss.

But this – looking at her dead – suddenly everywhere else there was life. Even the most moribund of geriatrics outside the curtain was fizzing with life. I want to rush around saying, look, this is what you’ve got, you’ve got life! – even the most miserable life is filled with thrills and beauty and perfection compared to death! Grasp life, live it! Live heroically! Everywhere there was life, as she was receding into, what – darkness? No, into the realm of transformation, of disintegration and reintegration, into the ground of being.

And, yes, too (entirely a creation of my brain) the angelic figure, bright and light-filled and flying and being, yes, a guardian angel. And I understand funeral rites, preservation of bodies, grave goods – not as resources for when on ‘the other side’, but as manifestations of their life, the isness of their life, the gathering together of all the stuff around them, before death, everything with them at the crossing. To have taken it back would have been churlish. And, yes, I do feel the spotlight falling on me. Jupiter rising. I feel giddy, disattached, as if I’m on something.

Dad was the warrior revealed. Mum was the performer on the stage, the consummate actress, who do you want me to be, I’ll be it, in the spotlight. And then the spotlight empty.

This morning on my round, watching Venus low in the west in the gathering light, saying – once Venus is gone, she is gone. The sky red at the horizon, Jupiter high, hoar frost, silhouettes of trees, each a different pattern, thinking – this is the first sunrise in my life that mum won’t wake to.

12 Jan, 1995. Hill Town.

Well.
I’d arranged to be at Vicky’s at twelve, got wet through collecting the wood, had to take off my trousers when I got there. Our conversation was wary, after Monday, but gradually we warm and find ourselves, mutual magnets, drawn closer. I say, ‘I have a cuddle for you’, intending just that. She kneels between my legs, and we embrace for a long time, comfortable. Then she fondles through my underpants, making the soft oohing sound that’s so arousing. Shall I take off my underpants? She nods. A large erection. She caresses, strokes, sucks. I unbutton her blouse, squeeze her breasts, soft now after last summer’s hardness of neglect, sighs, closes her eyes. Soon we’re in bed, naked and fucking, she as wonderful as ever, big and pillow-soft, light and amenable, available, open. Our eyes rove, always astonished by this intimacy, our lips kiss, our hands caress, roam, explore endless bodies, this love-making that comes from enlivened sensuality, bodily desire, is thoughtless and endless, my cock is all over alive, her cunt when I enter draws me in, alive and tuned, taking my cock deep into her, drawing the spunk up and up, from my toes through my hips and out – I’m out of her, she still fears sperm inside her – onto her round belly, light and sparkling and full of life.

It’s curious how easily I pull on my clothes, say, ‘I have to go’, go home to make Tom’s lunch, and pick up Stella at 2. We have a lovely afternoon in Salisbury, a couple out shopping, attentive and interested, admired. I buy a mac – I think she’s trying to smarten me up, and I’m okay with that. I drop her at home, shop with Tom, and am soon back at her house to eat.

After an embrace, she asks, ‘how much do want this relationship to work?’ I say, ‘very much, why do you ask?’ ‘Because I know you’re still seeing Vicky.’ ‘How did you find out?’ ‘I’m not going to tell you. I thought I could handle it, but I’ve had a couple of drinks, and I can’t.’ We eat and talk. A couple of weeks ago she told me of her long affair with her husband’s best friend, deceiving her husband and her lover’s wife, even staying with them at their house. And that was not her first affair. And of course I am ‘an affair’. But her husband, the wife, didn’t know. And for her it’s all in the knowing. ‘If they don’t know, they’re not hurt.’ And I guess I felt the same with Vicky, Stella not knowing. But now she knows. The conversation peters out.
And then we find ourselves on our feet, in a clinch, looking into each other’s faces, she grips me hard. I squeeze her small breast really hard, twist, she laughs harshly, you can’t hurt me – but I’m going to hurt you. She leads me upstairs into her bedroom, strips me, orders me to lie on the bed face down, ties my hands and feet, paints my nails bright red, lipstick on my mouth, blindfolds me. And then, using my college scarf (I learn later. I’d lent it to her on a walk. Long and heavy. The next morning I find there are three large knots in it) she flogs me. Hard. It hurts. Each blow, on buttocks, back, shoulders, I take, 8, 9 – only on the tenth, applied with extraordinary force and venom, that really hurts, do I curl up, cry out, ‘Enough!’
I don’t know if she would have stopped anyway, whether 10 was the number. Or whether the tenth would have released an uncontrolled assault. But, she stops.
My back is on fire. She is panting. I have a vision of this tiny creature wielding the heavy scarf with total fury. I lie face down, thinking. It’s the first time I’ve been beaten. When my father beat my brother, when friends were beaten at school, there was within me envy, a desire. Not to be punished, but to be hurt, to find out how I would ‘take it’, endure. And this beating had been for me a transaction: I had done, in her eyes, wrong, and this was retribution.

Part of me had also wondered whether such a ritualised giving and receiving of pain would unlock a cabinet of sado-masochistic desires, practices. It didn’t. But, face down, blindfolded, I thought about that last blow. It had been too hard, too much. I wondered whether she was getting carried away, by the unaccustomed power – especially over a man – that I had become all men, and she might never have stopped. What if I wasn’t able at any moment to stop her, what if I’d really been helpless?

She unties me, takes off the blindfold. She is shocked. At what she’s done? At me allowing her to do it? At my lack of anger? At the bruising? She takes off her clothes and we go to bed. I hold her in my arms. Neither of us sleeps well. At times in the night I consider leaving, that last blow … I stay. We talk.
‘Why did you let me do it?’ ‘Because you wanted to.’ ‘What a horrible thing to have done!’ ‘You must acknowledge your anger, hatred even, of – I don’t know.’ She nestles. I say, ‘we are brother and sister.’
In the morning we make love. She says, ‘I’m glad we make love.’ We are both emptied, emotionally spent. And we have a sense that events have been set in motion that need to run their course. We are helpless and sad. I go home and she goes to lunch with friends. In the afternoon I realise that nothing will change, I will continue to see Vicky, until something happens.

13 Jan, 1997. Hill Town.

‘Dear Helen
Happy New Year!
At last a little space, after a full month of things happening. Nothing of
great moment, most of it work and Christmas, just stuff. The stuff that fills space, takes up time, and leaves me distanced from myself – the ‘outer’ person doing all the living while the inner is neglected, complains of the neglect and, being insecure and full of doubt begins to believe the outer’s story that he is a drag on his life, unworthy, irrelevant, better to live without … etc.
Tom came and went. He enjoyed being home, it was lovely to have him home, but also the reassuring sense of him moving out of our orbit into the wider world, that my days of father-to-son-at-home are over, happy days happily relinquished.

I went to the sea on New Year’s Day, touched it at Durdle Door, drank to the New Year with a taste of sea water, primordial, sat at its edge for a long time, taking in its vast splendour as the sky changed from blue to red to purple to night. So many stars. 

‘ One earthly Thing
truly experienced, even once, is enough for a lifetime.’

A developing sense of having a more public life: teaching tai chi; a group interested in the specialness of Hill Town; moving towards publishing the France book; contented at being not in a relationship, and not being between relationships, being on my own. We’ll see.
I enclose two new poems. Write soon and tell me your news.
Warm thoughts.’

5:30pm
‘Not wooing, no longer shall wooing, voice that has outgrown it,
be the nature of your cry; but instead, you would cry out as purely as a
bird when the quick ascending season lifts him up, nearly forgetting
that he is a suffering creature and not just a single heart
being flung into brightness, into the intimate skies. Just like him
you would be wooing, not any less purely –, so that, still
unseen, she would sense you, the silent lover in whom a reply
slowly awakens and, as she hears you, grows warm, –
the ardent companion to your own most daring emotion.’
Seventh Duino Elegy, RM Rilke.

14 Jan, 1986

15 Jan, 2007. Hill Town.

Rain on the skylight. Toothache returns, very painful.
I finished the Brimstone accounts, and was walking to the bank when, ‘beep’, twice, I ignore, of course it’s Stella, out with her mother. Later she phones to say let’s meet next Wednesday, the day before she returns to France. She lets slip she’s free this Thursday, so clearly wants to rehearse old ground, not dare new. Disappointing.
I need to get my contribution to the Breach Common book moving, or drop out.

‘By this measure the duty of writers is to please readers and to be eager to do so, and this duty has various subsets: the duty to be clear; to be interesting and intelligent but never wilfully obscure; to write with the average reader in mind; to be in good taste. Above all, the modern writer has a duty to entertain. Writers who stray from these obligations risk tiny readerships and critical ridicule. Novels that submit to a shared vision of entertainment, with characters that speak the recognisable dialogue of the sitcom, with plots that take us down familiar roads and back home again, will always be welcomed. This is not a good time, in literature, to be a curio. Readers seem to wish to be ‘represented’, as they are at the ballot box, and to do this, fiction needs to be general, not particular. In the contemporary fiction market a writer must entertain and be recognisable – anything less is seen as a failure and a rejection of readers.’ Zadie Smith. 2007

‘The Villa Seurat Series, Miller announced, had been “formed in answer to a contemporary demand for greater freedom of expression in literature”, a demand more strongly felt by the author than by the public. The Series would search for the one book every writer wants to write, that is, the book “nobody understands,” which no “publisher wants to print.” the “hypothetical book… your writer never writes, because there would be nothing left to do with it when written – except perhaps burn it.” The Villa Seurat Series was “the only home in the world for such a production. Its interest is not in the merely unprintable book, but in the unwritable book … and … for those authors whose work does not derive from, or cater to, the commercial standards of the day, it exists as an incentive to write books which lie on the side of the precipice.”’ Miller’s announcement for the VSS imprint of Kahane’s Obelisk Press. 1935.

16 Jan, 1990. Hill Town.

Dear Paul
Thanks for your supportive letter. Sat in the tranquillity of my attic room it’s difficult to believe that the events of the last six months happened. Still less that after twenty-one years of being home- and family-, ie Jane-centred, that I simply walked out. Perhaps a chronological account will help.
Over the summer I was doing some carpentry for friends. Steve had started an affair, and although they still shared the house (they have two teenage daughters) they were no longer sleeping together, and Vicky was beginning to come to terms with being on her own, and the end of a relationship that had never been, for her, very satisfactory. Jane and I were estranged, sleeping apart.

So Vicky and I talked a lot, over the kitchen table, an hour a day before I got on with the cupboards. And I guess without realising it we were telling each other a lot about ourselves, and clearing the ground between us.

Vicky went to Spain on a course, and when she came back things had changed. We went for a drink, and found that crazy, magical things were happening. It was a long hot summer here, a summer for big things to happen. I called it a seven-year summer. Then we both went on family holidays, and thought about each other all the time.

When we got back we decided, rather solemnly if I recall, to ‘have a secret affair’. We never seemed to get the affair bit together, but kept meeting, and Jane soon found out. Perhaps a measure of how little individual life I had. Probably I wanted her to find out, to continue our collusion and give her the chance to turn a blind eye. She went crazy – abusive phone calls to Vicky, assaults and shouting at me, especially when Tom was there, demands that I make instant choices, ‘it’s me or that woman – go and tell her tonight that it’s over, or pack your bags!’

Well I guess I just got fed up with being pushed around and abused, and treated with no respect. I guess that’s it – Jane says how much she loves me (although how little I’ve felt loved), wants me, can’t live without me, etc, but with no respect for me as an individual human being. Treated as her possession, not to be trusted with volition, a disobedient dependant to be brought back into line, a dog to be brought to heel.

But every storm, assault, tirade I weathered strengthened me, made me realise the degree to which I’d lost myself by knuckling under. I refused to stop seeing Vicky. And that was less about Vicky than about me refusing to do what I was told. I felt my being depended on that refusal. I’d seen a friend whipped in, not pretty. It would have been the end of me.

As things got worse I placed an ad for accommodation in return for work, was quickly offered this room in a doctor’s house, and when things got no better, I moved out, into this room. Vowing that even if Vicky finishes with me tomorrow, I won’t move back.

Although Jane is the best friend I’ll ever have, I realise now how she blanked me out, placed herself between me and the world, possessed me, denied me to myself. Which was unforgivable. And I can’t now imagine not living alone.

It sounds like things aren’t great between you two, hence this long account, so give me a call if you want to talk.

17 Jan, 1996. Hill Town.

Dear Helen
Heavens, yes, Songs of Swans was very Women’s Lib! And I wrote a novel at the same time about women going to the moon and returning with ‘moon wisdom’ to save the earth. I was quite certain that women could save the world. In fact I was handing over my power, like a guilty Tolstoy handing over his estates. The inevitable confusion of roles was disastrous and ultimately terminal for my marriage. And the marriage had been made possible by actions for which I can’t forgive myself. A relationship born under a bad sign.

On the other hand, Songs could be read as a celebration of my anima …? Or of the taking off of my creative spirit …?

There were always swans on the river and the canal at home, and I remember as a small child being fascinated by the contrast between the swimming, the taking-off, and the flying swan, at once creatures in their separate realms, and a creature with uncanny powers of transformation. And its essence, its essential ‘swan-ness’, was in the taking-off, the combination of self-belief, effort, will, and single-mindedness that invested the swimming and flying swan with an aristocratic, even god-like quality that other water birds did not have: the quality of its being was derived from the quality of its doing. And how fascinating to read later of the birth of Apollo on Delos, and it being celebrated by swans flying round the island seven times! And how later his chariot was pulled by swans to Hyperborea, ie Britain, where he lived and was venerated for the three months he was not the centre of the oracle at Delphi.

It would be interesting to write it as a male swan. I wonder how different it would be? All the phases and changes swan goes through were my changes. But I’m sure having a male swan would produce differences.

Jane always promised she would make sure it was published, even if she had to publish it herself. Of course she never did, instead kept it to herself, as with everything I gave her, including myself, as her possession.

I’ve finished writing Part I of the new book! I’m now in transition from Part I to Part II, from roots to trunk. I began it when Vicky left. I stopped writing when Stella and I got together. I resumed it when Stella left and I started seeing Vicky again. And as I finished it, I realised that Vicky and I are absolutely finished. I had gone for a drink with Stella, which pleasantly returned us to our previous position of ‘friends who say hi in the street’. Then Vicky and I had a long conversation, and as I put the phone down I realised that our relationship was now in the past. ‘I awoke from The Sickness at the age of fifty, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health.’ The opening of The Naked Lunch. I especially like ‘calm and sane’. I now have a new role, as the spare at married friends’ dinner parties who they plan to pair off with unattached friends. The novelty flabbergasts me. No pairing so far, but some nice dinners, and a new social position.

18 Jan, 2003. Hill Town.

Yesterday a green woodpecker accompanied me along Love Lane and down St John’s Hill on my round. It tapped each tree, then darted with its heavy dipping flight to the next. Looking for food? Marking its territory? At the bottom, as I delivered the last letter, it gave three harsh cries, an alert to now, to be in the present (a Huxley messenger bird) and flew off. A single green feather fluttered down, landed at my feet. The book says they are birds of prophecy and magic power, ‘guides to the mastery of non-conformity’.

This evening, how odd, walking back along Pine Walk, the full moon above the Downs through the tracery of branches, I met Stella. She was very physical. But that’s Stella. She had just written to me about mum. We talk about our mothers. I mention the concert, the summer outdoor concert, our mothers sat side by side on folding chairs, white-haired, eyes bright in the stage lights, we sat at their feet like children, smiling to each other in complicity as they bathed in the romanticism of the popular classics. She says, ‘I put that in the letter.’ About their plans for their place in France. She’s settled, happy as a ‘pig in shit.’ (Typical Stella. I’d have preferred, ‘sheep in clover.’) she’s sixty next week. They’ll do up a house for her son, then move to France next year. I realise I’m coming on to her. And that she’ll be flattered. I remember that a full moon through trees is for her the essence of romance. I’d forgotten how she talks all the time, never listens. How do I feel? No great heart leap, or regret. It worked, it is no longer, I don’t miss it. And yet the allure of having someone. Anyway I was feeling smug about A Summer in France, already in my mind, ‘the oddest bestseller of the year’. Or perhaps, and preferably, a quiet but regular seller that keeps me. I’ve had my France experience. Can I imagine living in France with her? No. Or anywhere? No. There is in her a help-meet … But, no. Odd, very odd.

19 Jan, 2000. Hill Town.

Rain. Again. More. I’m on Semley. The drains fill with water, overflow into the high-banked lanes that run with water, the grass is under water, I step through water, onto grass, tarmac, concrete, no idea until my foot lands. Three concrete steps, the rain flowing over them like a water feature; coils of water flowing prettily down the lanes, the world turning into a water garden. Except that I’m in it, delivering mail in it, and the farmers must work in it, and the cattle stand in it, as the slurried yards fill with liquid shit. Half an hour with Mrs Pitman. By the window, dreary prospect of mist, wind and rain, and the wide view over a grey and mud-bound world. She talks. Relatives are dying, her sons aren’t well, the daughters-in-law have sick, demanding fathers. And a farming world of filling in forms, beef bans, tumbling incomes that’s beyond her and her sons’ understanding. ‘It used to be you’d produce the milk and get paid for the milk, and the harder you worked and the more you produced, the more you got paid. Not now. It doesn’t make sense. I thought milk was a staple, something everyone needs. “Produce more milk, for the children”, they said. Not now. They don’t even have it at school anymore.’ Art. and she had built from nothing (he a labourer), to something. Working for an employer. Renting. Renting bigger. Buying. The farm for the boys. Set up. And done on hard work, the margin you get from working longer and harder. Art. worn out, dying young. But the farm, bought, theirs, for the boys. They employed a man they thought was a friend, he’s suing them. The incomers complain if hedge banks get damaged. But time is money and you have to drive the tractors hard. ‘And their cars fill the lanes, slow you down. What can you do?’ As I drive the van down from her bungalow to the farm in the bottom, the unrepaired access road is running mud, the yard slurry-bound, everything has a dark aspect, shit-coated and hardened, everything viewed through it. I see it in David, as helpless as his cattle. Imagine a rope creaking from a beam in the barn. Three generations, they say, one to make it, one to keep it, one to lose it. This will be two. And the life of Mrs Pitman, a lovely, generous woman, a life of hard work, with a hard man, come and gone.

At home I strip off, everything wet through, drop clothes in the bath, dress, resume the dry world. And open this letter, from Edward Field, the American poet I looked after at the Wessex Poetry Festival last year:

‘Dear Keith
I’m grounded with the flu, and was flipping through Fire 9, feeling dissatisfied with the poems, when one poem stopped me with its haunting music.
Forgive me, I’m somewhat gaga – I didn’t remember your name. But when I read in the contributors’ notes you were a postman, something clicked and I jumped up and checked my address list and found your card in the pile of unanswered mail on my desk. Of course I immediately remembered you were that sweet guy who drove me from the station and through the magical Dorset night of hedgerows and tarrants. Thank you, thank you for ‘The Traveller’, which rescued me for a moment from my bleak New York life. It has the glimmer of the mysteries I sensed in your landscape.
And thanks for the New Year’s card.
I wish you all good things in the coming year(s), and may you hit more poems dead center like that one.
Edward.’

I’m a poet!

20 January, 1991. Hill Town.

In the pub Vicky says, ‘we haven’t talked about you seeing Dawn.’
‘What do you want to say?’
‘It’s just that I don’t like the woman, never have. I think she’s predatory and self-seeking. I thought it was a blooming cheek when she said about phoning you if there was a concert she’d like to go to.’
‘I’m sure we have different views of fidelity. Yours is of exclusivity.’
‘All I know is that if anything like that happened, it’d lose its interest. If it’s not exclusive it’s not special and there’s really nothing to it.’

It’s a statement that freezes my blood, that our carefully-nurtured relationship (involving her detaching me from wife and family) is something she could let go of so readily. Having ‘got’ me, she’s now clearing the area around me, like a kill zone around a castle. She will now patrol it, warning off other women, while rubbishing them to me.
And I want to do the unforgivable, and be forgiven.
She sits on the side of the bed, naked, sucking my cock. On impulse I put my hands under her thighs and flip her onto her back, she laughs. I hold her legs apart, my head down between, absorbing her aromas, ‘no, you mustn’t, I haven’t washed …’, lick her, part her lips and, ‘what are you …?’ I push me tongue into her, ‘oh my god, oh my …’ I lick and probe until she is wet and my face is wet, I say, ‘I want to be inside you, I want you around me,’ and feel, as I push into her, how easily, how appropriately my cock slides in, and feel – complete. We are one.

Yesterday was the last day of the US ultimatum to Iraq. I played ‘O Superman’ again and again:
‘They’re American planes.
made in America.
Smoking,
And non-smoking.’

Today the attack began. 400 sorties overnight, 1200 planned in the first twenty-four hours. All filmed, especially vivid at night, good on tv. They talk of precision missiles that can fly along specified streets, but this is a blitzkrieg. And a curious disconnect between the ferocity of the onslaught and and the calm manner in which it’s being done, the technocratic cool and the incendiary result, the calmness of the finger on the button and the fury and destruction unleashed, is devastating. I watch aghast. There is something god-like in the calm destructiveness, the implacability, the unleashing of a power so out of proportion to an individual man. But it’s also – in the inventing of systems, the finger on the button – the bullied nerd’s response to the physical world’s oppression of him. And of course it’s an opportunity to test systems and munitions safely (with no fear of response) and in ‘battlefield (ie bombing a city) conditions.’

21 January, 1991. Hill Town.

To Bristol, the Arnolfini, creations by Rachel Whiteread. The main piece is ‘Ghost’, a plaster cast of an entire room: walls, door, bay window, fireplace, light switch, skirting boards, picture rails, coving. It is monumental. For some reason I think of the beehive tomb at Mycenae. And yet it is the cast of an ordinary room. The casts face outwards, so they are moulds – fill them with whatever material, flexible resin, steel, perspex, mirror glass, and, cast removed, you would have a copy of the room. Imagine. We inhabit rooms on the surface, our lives displayed there – hence the poignancy of wallpaper on a partially-demolished building, of stripping layers of wallpaper. We live in the inner space created by the surfaces, with little idea of what happens beneath the surfaces, which walls are load-bearing, what joists look like, where cables and pipes go. Imagine a perspex cast of all that is behind the surface. Or a Von Hagens’ plastination of the cables and pipes.

But I want to get into the room. Except it would be out of the room …. I imagine it solid. I want to be at its centre, at the point of maximum density – which in a room is the point of maximum emptiness, of distance from – of maximum compression, and therefore definition. Whereas the centre of a room is the place where one flies apart, by the gravity pulling from all that is around.

And Ghost, the film, Patrick Swayze leaping through the portal to reach the girl, the ‘schwish’ of him passing through, and into a medium denser than himself (he’s dead, a spirit.) To pass into something denser than the self. Is that what spirits have to do, endure, when they are born in/into bodies?

As we walk, we gallery frequenters, prowl around this imprisoned beast, I note the tactile surface of the plaster. And the accuracy – I can see what sort of light switch it is, the section of skirting and picture rail, the sash windows, that there are no power points. I can imagine a room, wallpaper, lives. Perhaps Sickert’s ‘Ennui’. Or a Christmas party. And wonder where I am as I walk around it, look at it …? Ah.

 And, leaving the room, this thought. Imagine the artist inside, tumbler held against each wall, listening to us outside. And yet we are inside. I can walk around it, but there is no way out of it. I can only walk away. Whereas she, outside the room we are in, inside the work she has made (watching the setting plaster – will it work …?), placed inside the work by involuting space, can remove herself and, her work finished, leave the work of art behind.

22 January, 1994. Hill Town.

Vicky suddenly feels another degree distant, as if she is – and this is exactly what I see – away planning her wedding.

I guess I’ve always known what would happen, after I met her at the station, back from Atsitsa – ‘no, don’t meet me at the airport, it’s no bother for me to get the train’, drinking in, storing up her last hours, minutes, moments with Rex, the flight, the arrival, the lingering parting. I wonder whose train left first, who saw whom off with the kiss, the wave, the wait till the train was gone …? – meeting her and seeing her happier, more beautiful, than I have ever known her, happier, more beautiful than I have or could ever make her. But after that instant knowing, a series of hopes, that sometimes seemed like expectations. Each dashed by reality, and followed by another degree of distance, of separation. As the elastic connecting us gradually stretched and thinned, and drooped. Ouch, bloody ouch. I don’t want her to go, to be gone. I really don’t. So I forget the pain, and wrap it up, and insulate it in ‘I forgot to remember to forget’, etc. And then something makes it spill out, naked, without skin. And, oh the pain.
Why so strong now? Probably because planning her wedding is exactly what she’s doing now. Ouch bloody ouch.
No one else makes sense.

(Earlier)
I think I have a hook into the rest of this chapter, so I felt alright about pursuing other things. I watched tv, and went to bed early. A night of sleeping, reading, dreaming, making notes in my bedside notebook.
It’s like I’m watching my life drift away from me and disappear into the night, and I’m left in the dark and the wet and the cold of the mid-Atlantic.
It’s as simple as that. I didn’t think it was possible to miss someone like this. Now I do. And I don’t like it one bit. I really don’t know how to live with it.
My heart is like a stone I want to vomit up.
But why doesn’t it make sense?

And this dream. I’m in a bed, high up, like a bunk bed. Melanie comes in, sits on the bed below, starts circling holidays in a brochure, really happy, the circles getting thicker and bigger, she’s laughing. And I’m happy for her. She’s cuddling the person in the bed with her, friendly, even passionate, it’s okay – I gradually realise that the person in the bed with her is me, I recognise my profile from double mirrors and photographs. Then she’s by my bed, and getting into bed with me, very passionate. I wake up feeling okay. Maybe never having entirely believed it.

 23 Jan, 1986. Hill Town.

A sombre day. Lynn walks past the house with a friend, dark dressed, dark hat pressing down her grey curls, walking slowly and silently, as if walking to a funeral in a dream. The wind moans strangely, and there is a calmness that is not quite real, a thickness around everything, an invisible fog, isolating, as if people who know each other could pass each other very close and not acknowledge them even though they know they are there.

It came to me suddenly yesterday as I walked up to town in the rain. The next stage is the desert. After the rush down the mountain river, all effort spent fending off rocks and bailing out the frail craft, out onto the lake, the alternative landing places, the indecision, at last choosing … – or did my boat happen to touch that shore, and I chose to regard it as fate, and land there, on the shore of relationship rather than solitary endeavour? (Thinking she would help me with my writing, wrongly as it turned out). And so into the forest, of living with and family and a social circle and work, writing squeezed in. Or out. He walks out of the forest, into the desert. Or rather the forest thins around him, and he sees once more the destination long obscured by undergrowth and trees. Into the desert, not necessarily alone, but with the recovered awareness that one is always alone, and that what matters is not intentions but actions. 

I slept well and woke alert. But trouble is brewing. Jane is planning something. Or rather, is open to acting when the opportunity presents itself and she sees what she can do. Her monstrous jealousy. Which I realise I feed, unwittingly but probably deliberately, my words and actions logs and coals on her jealousy. I try to look around, be aware, protect my flank. But my inner pessimism has me believe that I will miss the signs (oh, her brilliance at misdirection!), and that the avalanche will hit me. The question is whether it overwhelms me, sweeps me away, or invigorates me.

And. I read Three Rivers in France (picked up almost at random, second-hand) and suddenly the ideas for ‘A Summer in France’ come back to life, refreshed and renewed. Things I included, unknowingly, confirmed: the importance of the Gorges; the springs in the river bed, cold and purifying; the desert of Larzac and the Causses (the massacre of the Bir Hakim camped on the Causse Méjean); the pilgrim road to Compostella and the Templar strongholds to guard it (La Couvertoirade); the Huguenots and the Camisards; craft without art or artifice, an art that flows and flowers through natural feeling. That by coming there his new art would be, not of the gallery, but in and from the caves, the little churches, the carved pews, rooted, a root stock he could graft himself onto. So much to leave out from the first draft. And now – so much to put in! Je ne regrette rien, J’avance!

24 Jan 2007. Hill Town.

Light snow. A poignant meeting with Stella, touching. Without saying anything we automatically set  off on ‘our walk’, around the top of the hill, through woods and past vistas and along twisting paths, neither of us seeing or feeling any connection to this beautiful place, walking and talking. We recounted, with no intention to change anything. For the record. Old friends catching up, neither having in mind to see each other again. She is finding living in France tough, Jean’s cross-dressing and lack of interest in sex tough, his happiness – he is a carpenter and builder, and as long as he is working he is happy, and there is always work to do, ideas to try out – tough. She has involved her family, each of her children is renovating a house close by – or rather Jean is renovating – but they are mostly not there. I wonder why she doesn’t take a lover. But maybe that was her compact with him, you keep me (as her husband conspicuously failed to do), and I will be faithful. She has never mastered the language. Who does she talk to? ‘I have a tree. And the dogs, of course.’

But in the café at the top of Gold Hill, facing each other, when I spoke animatedly of living with Vicky in Oxford, she said, ‘now you’re alive!’ And standing by her car, kissing and holding each other, accompanied by the ‘oohs’ and ‘that’s nice’s’ of our repertoires, and enjoying, as ever, our physicality together (we’re very good at it, together), I realise that even if I might suggest, and she might agree (it’s been a long time, for her), that I won’t. Because it would be wrong in relation to Vicky, wrong to do something so significant without her knowing, to exclude her from a significant part of myself. What’s the word for that? Fidelity? I don’t want a separate experience. I want Vicky-and-I to be ‘as one’.

And maybe I’m beginning to understand why I never pursued the ‘possibilities’ that have been, and are, around. I feared becoming like Frank. How the ‘roué way’ becomes glib and repetitive, a way of avoiding deep engagement. Paddling in the shallows, never swimming out to the deep, never out of one’s depth, at risk.

If only Stella and I had been in love! But the relationship was always transactional. Which maybe explains why there was so much pleasure, so little pain in it.

And me, fidelity to Vicky, 28 years after first ‘seeing’ her!?!

25 Jan, 1972. London.

I’m sitting in the basement packing room, surrounded by books, cardboard, and jiffy bags, finishing my cheese sandwich before I start work. In front of me, beyond the dirty glass, the whirr of pigeons as they drop into and winch out of the light-well. They’re cooing now, soft breasty sounds. The sharp chatter of an unknown bird. The noise of shovelling. The low hum of the city. In one corner of the well a bare tree rises the fifteen feet up to the yellow light that illuminates it, then higher so that it complements perfectly the blue sky, where they exist in the same plane.

Cold. Very clear. Blue sky, the horizon a haze of browns and greys and purples and yellows. The train passes glass-walled buildings that flair gold with the passing sun. 

The lake in St James’ Park is frozen, but covered in a film of water that creates a perfect mirror of trees, Whitehall buildings, sky, and crossing birds. The ducks think they are landing on water and skid and tumble across, very Disney. A man holds out his hand, bread filled, not moving, for a long time. No bird comes. He withdraws his hand, tips out the crumbs, walks slowly away. The birds descend in a quarrelling heap. His centre of gravity is his loneliness. There is one black swan, vivid against the snow, bright red beak.

I would like to paint in the evenings (I write to make sense, I paint to explore. Art is dipping the net into the flux. The mesh is never fine enough (Miller). The artist is the net), but Denise and Johnnie are in there, smoking and having noisy sex. C housekeeps in her room, forever tidying. Anyway it would be difficult to paint with only reading lights and candles – David had blown the light circuit again.

I fled to this job. I needed to wait longer, to hover, to live nowhere, to maintain the sheet of finest Chinese paper on which a future might precipitate, slowly appear. But my nerve failed. Again. The problem with making a decision is not what you choose, but what you thereby exclude. Everything else. All other possibilities. From all to one.

That kick at the party. Talking to Bridie, she was saying how desperate she’d been when I’d gone with Jane at the party. She’d fled to her brother’s squat. Taken acid. ‘You’ve never really seen, have you, never really felt,’ a face so familiar and suddenly beautiful as I’d never seen her – why weren’t you like this when we were together? – I was dipping down to drink in her beauty. And then the kick, hard, on my shin, and Jane hissing, ‘you fucking shit.’ I didn’t face her. I fled outside. Rosie found me, says ‘I love them both dearly, they’re both bonkers, but you have to choose.’ Jane came back to London, I went on to my parents’, and had a weekend to decide: back to Textile City, Bridie, the gang; on to Jane, to make good on my commitment. Why the commitment? I had wanted to stop the merry-go-round of meet, fall in, fall out, leave. But had I stopped in the wrong place, got off with the wrong person? A decision. Now live with it. But will I ever forget that kick on the shin, ever stop feeling it? Time to pack some books.

26 Jan, 1991. Hill Town.

A day in London. To Cecil Court, pool of echoing quiet between two busy streams, to Watkins, customers seeking the way to salvation, dangling pendulums over books to discover ‘the one’. For me, working there – how many books I read, seeking! – Krishnamurti, ‘Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth’, he said this to his followers, dissolving the Order. And the fat lady who sang for coppers, the coins clutched in her fat hand, the Court the perfect acoustic for her voice, high and light, a comforting presence – but once, I was working in the basement, hearing her voice through the grill, among the footsteps and talk and distant traffic, busy working, and suddenly it was a sliver of glass flying through the air with the sun on it. Did she hear it?

Schiele at the RA. Self-portraits from twenty to twenty-four, his relentless self-examination, stripped of clothes, skin, even flesh, in grotesque poses, masturbating, laid out, always the shock of hair, and always the fierce gaze held. Not Narcissus admiring himself. Not the analyst, revealing his different selves. But Jacob wrestling with his angel self, in the mirror, through the glass, resolving the Self (for ‘behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty master, an unknown sage. His name is Self. In your body he dwells’), then moving on, a depicter of naked bodies. In opposition to Klimt’s ornamental concealment, his … a woman walks between me and a sprawling nude as poems sprout in me like flowering crystals, she turns, startled that she has crossed in front of me, golden hair, her coat a vivid patchwork, her face a pale blank, red lips, large eyes with black irises, a walking Klimt, shocked, passes on. 

Crossing the bridge, I burst into tears. How could I? I broke his heart, and my heart cracked forever. Cadaverous faces walking towards me, a Munch street scene, I reach the middle, look over, reflections of lights in the water, so much livelier than the real thing, either watch from the bridge forever tantalised, or plunge off to grasp them, watch them rise towards me, I touch them at the interface, and then I am through and in the water, grappling with myself, twisting round and seeing, not the last reflection but the stars, holding my breath, blood pounding in my temples, I can contain myself no longer, open my mouth and the water pours in.

I have a pint in the Peoples’ Palace, the Festival Hall, as dancers dance serenely, and catch the 21:35.

27 January, 1997. St Ives.

The sky in grey washes, thickening to the rope-coiled sea, its leading edge a wall rising in green translucence, rising, thinning like glass, curving and collapsing to sudsy foam. A tottering child runs wide-armed towards it, to embrace the rising green. His father lifts him, legs still running, to experience it, the endless swelling ocean.

Dinner with Elizabeth. She talks of her mother’s death, the emptiness as she stared into dark and emptiness, has spent her time since coming – failing to come – to terms with it, must accept the endless abyss. Analysis five times a week. ‘My morning ritual,’ she says. ‘Some jog. Some write diaries. I do analysis.’

Dear Malcolm

I am writing this in the garden of the Barbara Hepworth museum. Here are the studios, with blocks of stone with drill marks, ready to begin, shaped pieces for her to work on, work in progress. The hammers and chisels and files and papering boards are laid out. Smocks hang on the wall. It’s as if she’s just stepped out for a smoke. The garden is densely planted with exotics, palm trees and thick-leaved succulents and spear-leaved plants. A tropical garden. And yet the light is soft grey, seagulls wheel endlessly above, a church bell sounds, one note. The garden is filled with her bronzes. There is a battle between the refined geometries and smooth forms, and the burgeoning growth. And after twenty years, the vegetation is winning, slowly burying the sculptures as in a Mayan jungle. Did she want this, to acknowledge that man’s (woman’s) work has its time, whereas nature is ever renewing? Or perhaps she believed that her revelations and embodiments of timeless geometries could survive the most rampant of changing natures. Whatever, it is poignant to come upon these shapes, still and distilled, held moments of perfection, among the ever-growing and wind blown, with birds traversing the sky, and everyday sounds beyond the high wall. And then to sit amidst this noise and movement, settled in a chair, in my own stillness, allowing my eye to move from sculpture to sculpture, from convex to concave, carried across space and then enclosed in space, staying with a piece and caressing its surface, exterior and interior, and then resting at the still centre: the whole sculpture is alive around it, but the still empty centre is the reason the piece was made. And having arrived at that point, my eye can move from piece to piece with a new affection, so that what was monumental and remote is now pleasingly domestic, I can put each piece under my arm, like a cat. Perhaps it is the ultimate praise for a work of art: it has taken me to the remotest reaches of abstraction and space, and I have returned refreshed to this place, where I am sitting, in the body that bounds me, with a cleansed eye for what is around me, and a renewed pleasure in the everyday.

‘That was the real world; I have touched it once,
And now shall know it always …’

28 January, 2001. Hill Town.

A curious happening. I can’t make sense of it. I had spent the day feeling tired, not wanting to go to the event. I’m first at the pub, which is full of kids my son’s age, celebrating a twenty-first. Nice to be out, in the world; but my habitual detachment, space around myself. And then, this realisation – that my lifetime of separating myself is (at last) yielding results, the necessary separation, of having space all around, of being slightly off the ground, a little unhitched from life, has been necessary in order to become an artist. A long-haul version of Rimbaud’s ‘systematic derangement’. That I’m no longer the guy who wants to be the guy on the stage; I can be, and sometimes am, the guy on the stage.

Rosie arrives, she’s had a busy day getting little done. To the venue. Shirley is at the desk. And with her … Let me describe. Slender. Upright. Straight back. Willowy? Maybe a dancer. Poker? Maybe a lawyer. Her head is elegant and balanced her on a tall, slender neck. Oval face. The face of one controlled but not inhibited. Crescent eyebrows. Inquiring eyes, Straight nose. Neatly outlined mouth. Lips slightly pursed. She smiles – a gap between her front teeth, which is endearingly goofy. A direct look. Engaging. We engage. Rosie and I sit down, she tells me she’s Kate, one of Paul Taylor’s (the local guru’s) crowd. I can’t take my eyes off her. I’m hardly aware of the performance. At the interval I scoot over to the desk and engage her in focussed conversation. (Oh dear, this sudden madness of focussing on one and nothing, no one else, matters.) I ask her where she lives, what she does, every so often check, is this okay? She waves me on, intrigued. Poised, she is aloof but interested. Says, Shirley is on her own, I’d better talk to her, goes over. A man takes the cash box. I go over and tell them. Who? I don’t know – but he was wearing a striped jersey and a mask. Kate raises an eyebrow, Shirley disappears. Through the second half, I must get her phone number. I never do this. At the end ask her if she’d like to talk more. That would be fine. Do you want to give me your phone number? Yes. I stagger out, drunk on adrenalin, focussed effort, and achievement. I’ve done what I intended, there is absolute clarity, the stars.

I can’t sleep, keep re-running it, feeling awful. She is so clear and well-made, I’m such a mess. If I invited her here, I’d have to take a week to change everything. No, stop this! Don’t do your thing of finding out what she’s like, what she wants, then adapting to her – and later wanting yourself back. Sort yourself out, and then declare yourself. And don’t pursue obsessively, like the guy in Cold Feet, whose love bombing is narcissism. But I feel all at sea, lost, lacking in identity. I don’t know who to be for her, which identity to put on. She’s revealed so little! I want to put myself in her hands, say – sort me out, tell me what to do, I’ll do it, honest. But this is nonsense. If I have to invent or change myself, we’re not compatible. And the foolishness of focussing on one to the exclusion of everything, everyone, else. I know where that leads. And yet the charge. Like plugging into the mains. Like standing in the middle of a field, arms wide, and the lightning striking me, filling me – Yes!

29 Jan, 1994. Hill Town.

I couldn’t write yesterday. I can’t describe how I felt. A glowing repleteness, I guess, together with an overwhelming sense of there being no necessity, to do anything. All I wanted to do was nothing. Preferably with Stella.

Thursday was a wonderful day. I filled and iced the cake I’d made on Wednesday, bought everything for the picnic and meal. A candle holder and massage oil as presents, and suddenly a soft toy, a delightful leopard – or baby tiger? And camera film.

Stella came at 3. I load the car. We drive to King Alfred’s Tower. The weather clears. We walk, chatting, return to the car. I say – give me five minutes. I lay out the picnic on a tablecloth in the boot, champagne on ice, crackers and caviar, and light the many candles, close the boot. She almost collapses when I open the boot and she sees it – I’ve never had a surprise like this! It’s wonderful. Photographs, eat, drink, toast. The weather closes in. We drive back. She goes home to feed the kids, returns at 8. We have onion soup, salmon, new potatoes, sugar snap peas, Chardonnay wine and her whisky, and the candle-lit cake with her name on it. She makes a wish. Then presents. The soft toy is immediately named Alfred. To bed. She milks the orgasm from me, deliciously. She stays. We sleep together. How wonderfully she sleeps, unconscious and abandoned. She drives me to work at 4:45.

During the morning I wonder why she hasn’t phoned, worry that Bob has come back, invent ever-worse scenarios. She calls in at 2:45, with gifts, leaves immediately for school. A rose. Bette Midler CD. A card:

‘You took my breath away, and I still haven’t got it back!’
Dear Keith
Yesterday was so –? There are no words. It’s locked away forever inside me, for me to take out whenever I want to. For one so special, thank you
for sharing your specialness with me.
The flower is for you, and the song is for you (the last one on side 1). God bless you!
With luv Stella

‘some say love it is a river, that drowns the tender reed
Some say love it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed
Some say love it is a hunger, an endless aching need
I say love it is a flower, and you its only seed.

It’s a heart afraid of breaking, that never learns to dance
It’s the dream afraid of waking, that never takes a chance
It’s the one who won’t be taken, who cannot seem to give
And the soul afraid of dying, that never learns to live.

When the night has been too lonely, and the road has been too long
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed that with the sun’s love in spring becomes the rose.’

I’m touched that her free-flying sentimentality (I can imagine her singing this song – she has a fine voice, is a born performer – on her solitary walks with the dog long before we met) finds a landing place in me.

30 Jan, 1966. Oxbridge.

Sunday, my day off from studying, when I unmoor myself, free to imagine alternatives, follow leads suggested by The Observer. A research scientist, A L Copley, who is also a recognised painter, L Alcopley. For him his work meets in the moment of creation, with each presenting a vision of the world in a new light. In the same dimension. Whereas I see the artist as necessarily outside society. Colin Wilson and his subjects, and Hesse, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Cézanne, each had a margin of space around him. And since Mont-St-Victoire last summer, when I felt for the first time, entire, unattached (liberated); and at-one-with – everything (connected), I have imagined the possibility of me being an artist. And I’ve been refashioning the narrative I’ve accepted, of myself as working-class kid ‘making it’, into and in the middle-class world of higher education. How, from the only subject on the curriculum I enjoyed – art, and the only place I felt fulfilled – the art room, I was corralled, seduced, pressured, led away (being both clever and biddable) into subjects in which I could ‘better myself’, even, ‘do good’. Intellectual and material stuff. Art was for the dim and disaffected; and I was too clever for the first, too biddable to be the second. (At O Level, Latin, which I needed for Cambridge, and Art clashed on the syllabus, so I did Art in study periods and at night school.) An education ever more intellectual, art something to be appreciated, not done. And I’d gone along with this, in spite of a grumbling and growing dissatisfaction. Until reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – my education was not ēdūcō ,a drawing forth, but ēducō, a training. Intellectual progress, but a growing sense of a hollowing out – having cut me off from the ‘ordinary life’ of my class, I was now being separated from what had filled the emptied space, art. And the fear that, as a responsible and useful teacher, or town planner, or whatever, I would at thirty-five or forty find myself a disgruntled married man blaming his (my) family for my never having made the break and become an artist. (However successful or otherwise, that not the issue.)

Afternoon walk. I walk north along the river, past the gas works and the repairs to the canalised river, past buildings that remind me of those near the river at home, with a small playing field next to them. The river is on the left, curving round to the right. Not far along is an iron bridge over the river. Past it the gardens of houses run down to the river. A small dinghy tacks back and forth across the river just before the railway bridge. But what is captivating is the field itself, with the railway across the top that separates it from trees and buildings. The field is open and flat, a grey green colour. Above, but merging into the tops of the trees, is the grey blue green sky, pale grey at the horizon. There is a lamp post in the middle of the field, commanding attention. It fits into the scene. What’s the attraction of this scene? Not colour or shape, they  … fit into the scene. That’s exactly it. The view has surface, is surface. It is all in the same plane. The train speeding along the embankment is not a distant large train, but a train to the scale of the field as I see it. And the lamp post is the key, the point of focus, not within the scene’s perspective – there is no perspective – but on a plane surface. It both focuses the eye and fits into the plane. It creates the tension that is resolved in the whole that is at rest. I have seen scenes that have the quality of pictures – the rose-red view across the river when delivering Christmas post. This is a composition of three-dimensional objects that has exactly the quality, the unity, of a two-dimensional surface. It is a picture. The strange and beautiful moment when I entered the field, when I was both in front of the picture, and in the picture.

31 Jan, 2000. Hill Town.

The wind blows around the roof. There’s rain in the air. I sort poems for Tears in the Fence. I’m ready for my bike ride when I phone Vicky, say can I come round and give you a big hug? I’m still in my pyjamas. That’s okay. She’s dressed when I arrive. Hugs. And then she is talking excitedly. Her hair (a little shorter, nothing radical) – do you like it? The tidiness of her living room – see? On accepting things as they are rather than looking to some end state, some destination. Possible work in London. And we both come back to why neither of us is in a relationship. And as we talk, standing close, we see that we are not (are no longer) waiting for it, ‘the relationship’, to happen. That we recognise the strength of our connection, our attachment; at same time acknowledging the ‘incompetence’ of our relating. That ‘the relationship’ is not (is no longer) something we’re working towards. But is rather the measure of how each of us is doing on their journey, each’s ‘quest’ to be ‘more themselves’. That if we get it right, each in our life, in our selves, we will seamlessly find ourselves in a relationship with each other that is, right. After all the attempts we’ve made that have gone wrong. We’re both realising that ‘the relationship’ cannot be the goal, because at present that would involve one or both of us changing to fit the other’s idea of the relationship. Rather, we’re both beginning to see the way we relate as the touchstone, the measure of how each of is doing, individually. That ‘the relationship’ is the ‘perfect’ that can only be realised when each of us is ‘perfect’, and that meanwhile it is the measure of an alchemical process in each, not of transformation but of purification. That we cannot find the relationship through the relationship, find each other through the relationship. And standing inches apart – eyes sparkling back and forth, yes, fingers itching, desire upwelling, when so often we would slam together like magnets, and tear each other’s clothes off, and consume each other – we acknowledge that we have such regard for each other, for the relationship, that we must, pro tem, abjure the relationship. Separate, while acknowledging the connection, we will from time to time measure ourselves, and it, against this dynamic template. And thereby might achieve the relationship. I say – and if we get it right, it will be right, even if you are in Australia, and I am in France. And put like that, and imagining the Donne-ish poem I might make of it, all I can say is (bell rings, time to go to work, more to write, so it goes) – wow.

1 Feb, 1990 Hill Town.

Dear Jane

You said, I could see it being different when Tom grows up, we’d be able to sort out our relationship. While at exactly  the same time I was saying to myself, the day he leaves for university is the day I leave. I had at last determined not to die in this marriage, as your father died in his, and my father continues to die in his. Because you were crushing the life out of me, compressing me into a me you could control, fit into your version of the marriage. You said, the thing is I love you desperately. And yet for so long I haven’t felt loved by you. You called me ‘my love’, not as endearment but as possession. Your hand on my arm not in affection but ownership. You talked of us talking, but we were walking round inside a walled city called ‘our marriage’, talking, talking, paths we had walked and talked a thousand times. When I opened a gate you went crazy. You talked of the problem of the three of us. We produced, in difficult circumstances, a remarkable boy. But we failed, in difficult circumstances, to produce a girl. We’ve been out of kilter ever since, a gyroscope ever more erratic. I asked myself last summer, why does she keep me around? Seeing Vicky was me dropping a stick of dynamite into a logjam. You responded by declaring war, a war you were determined to ‘win’, whatever the devastation. At what point did you realise you had the perfect situation, with your – ‘go and tell her tonight that it’s over, or pack your bags!’? Either I tell her, and return as whipped in as Chris by Elaine. Or I leave, and you are the wronged woman, your weak-willed man seduced by a scheming hussy. And you even had the new man lined up! I spent two hours with Jim, spilling my guts, at the end he said, the thing is, Keith, I’m seeing Jane myself. You call it, her, shallow. But she is a nereid, you are Grendel’s mother. How near I came to dying down there! And yet, that summer, when she and I talked without touching. The summer of the ten-year flower I called it. In that summer my imagination revived, came back to life. New images: of a knot pulled that suddenly is a straight piece of string; of wandering in a maze and unexpectedly coming out into the light; of bursting up from the depths and breathing; of a blockage removed and a surge of directed energy. It was the summer (whisper it) I found my muse.

2 Feb, 1977. London.

A letter from Gabrielle:
‘Keith
Bonjour! I am not waiting for your next letter. I have something to tell you. Today’s a very strange day. Rain, sky all white, & after, blue everywhere. A morning to listen to “More” from the Pink Floyd, peace, space and eternity.

‘That’s what I have to tell: I’ll be on holidays on February 18th (Friday after school) & I would like very much to go to London to England to see you and be in London with you. I would not be as friend because I can’t but as a lover to love you and be loved by you. I would not ask you any choice or decision, just to be together a few days. Don’t be afraid for what will happen for me after, I mean after the holidays when I will be again in Paris. It will be spring here, and I know I will not be sad, & I will not be alone, because love is inside me and things can go very fast and very well here. Please answer as soon as you receive this letter, because it takes a long time from London to Paris and I would like to know quickly what I will do during the holidays (to take a ticket for a train or prepare holidays in another place). I kiss you. G.’

The letter arrived as I was reading my diary of our time at La Balme, our time in Paris. How in a few days she brought La Balme to life, made me see again its beauty and possibility, after Jane’s relentless negativity to our ‘grand project’, our dream life of rural self-sufficiency and independence. And in Paris, the walks, the visits – the flea market! Pierre Bensusan in concert! – our conversations and love-making. Her eyes and her mouth. The twist of her head, the way she puts it on one side, quizzical, before, ‘ah, now I understand, it’s like this,’ and launches in and laughs when I laugh at its comical wrongness. And in that week I began to imagine a life, winters in Paris teaching English, summers at La Balme working on the place, she and friends visiting in their long summers, connecting with the locals in a way Jane and I never could …

And the delight of a week in London with one so open to delight. And certain that, Jane not knowing, it would be good for our relationship, my renewed lightness helping to lift the great weight in her. Impossible, of course. Her jealousy, to her infidelity not a relative but an absolute (last summer’s allowed because of her infidelity at the same time). And I had made my decision, I had chosen to return and recommit to the promises we made, not at our wedding, but our own ceremony six months before. And now I am back and she is full-on trying to get pregnant, which will be a long haul she says, and she approaching thirty. And me facing up to being the breadwinner for a family.

And Gabrielle too smitten, too vulnerable to be allowed to get in deeper. This way it is last summer’s holiday romance, that ended there, as the letters slowly peter out.

3 Feb, 1975. London.

The night of the hospital party. As I’m turning off the switchboard, transferring calls to the main hospital switchboard, Mary and Jean, assistant cooks, come to reception, clear, without speaking, that I’m the one they’re interested in. I’m wearing the shirt Bridie made for me, which I’ve never worn with Jane, to signal adulterous intent. I choose Mary. I always choose as if I’m choosing a wife. Which is a cruel way to choose a casual fuck. Or maybe I don’t like to be outshone (or in Jean’s case, outnoised). We danced and drank, me with Mary, Nic with Jean. Then to her room, tiny, in the nurses’ home at the back. Jean and Nic are noisy on the bed, Mary and I quiet on the floor. We kiss, we fondle, she goes to sleep. Where’s her room? Jean sits up, blouse open, bra loose, breasts small and hard. Next door, she says. And, as I’m lifting her up, adds – give her a good poke before you leave her. I carry her into her room, lay her on the bed. She’s spark out. She is rounded, almost chubby, a round grey mouse, pretty and soft. eighteen? Twenty? She’s wearing a low-cut dress, and her breasts are round and soft. I look at her. What to do? How serious was Jean? Is this Mary’s technique when approaching sex, to fein sleep, to be had? Or is she a virgin? If I touch her will she start screaming? I’ve had a few, but I’m a pondering drunk, a thoughtful drunk. All my conflicting ‘I wants’ rise bubbling to the surface as I look down at her. One rises to the top. I want her naked.

And so, in the guise, in my morally neutered state, of the thoughtful friend putting her to bed, not wanting her to wake in yesterday’s clothes, I strip her. I take off her dress. And her tights. The elastic marks. I kiss her breasts through her bra. I take off her bra, watch her breasts roll free and lie still, skin stretched slightly, follow with my eye the line from armpit round each breast, the fleshy roundness, the soft pink nipples. I press my head against them. I pull her pants down, over her largish bottom, down her smooth thighs. Her legs are together but relaxed. The triangle of hair thins down to the outline of her pubic mound. I kiss it. She stirs. And then I face it. To climb on and hope she wants it and damage limitation if she doesn’t …? To step back and masturbate …? To photograph her into my mind and later masturbate to the photograph …? And yet she is sweet, unsexual. But the arm that was comfortingly around her while she slept in Jean’s room cannot coexist with the arm that wants to part her legs so my prick, which is hard, can sink deep into her; and the hands that want to slip her nightdress onto her and tuck her in, cannot coexist with those that want to touch and roam and arouse. And yet they do. I look down at her. I wonder if she has been awake all the time: fearing my reaction if she protests; enjoying being touched and made naked, and looking forward to being taken. I settle on one. I slip her arms and head through the top of her nightdress, wriggle it down her body, under her bottom, down to her knees. She and I are safe. There is no more nakedness. My thoughts are no longer naked. I slip her under the covers, making comforting sounds, pull the blankets up to her chin, kiss my fingertip, touch it to her forehead, wish her goodnight. I switch off the light, creep through the hospital, walk through the clear nighttime city to the train. The shirt smells of sweat and cheap perfume. I drop it in the rubbish bin, wash, slip into bed behind Jane. She stirs and mumbles, ‘I don’t know if you’re cruel to be cruel, or to control. If it’s the first I can live with it. If it’s the second, I can’t. Night, night,’ and is asleep. I’m up and gone to the early shift before she stirs.

4 Feb, 1969. Textile City.

A week back from being alone in Whitby, where I found that I wasn’t ready to be alone in Whitby. I’d returned with one decision made, to go to Art School, a decision that, back in the world, I have already abandoned.

At breakfast Jean complained that I was using electricity while they were at college, so I made a point of leaving with them. I wandered around, looked at newsagents’ cards for rooms – but how could I get a room when I haven’t got a job? I cycled down to the Reference Library. I used to do school work in our local library, pitying the old men in the Reading Room as they clung to the warmth, life sifting through them. Is that me now? I look around at the shelves of books, and think of Sartre’s Autodidact, reading the library from A to Z, and realise that I too believed (believe?) that the answer is somewhere here. And of Camus’ Grand, endlessly rewriting the first page of his Great Work and getting no further. But isn’t that me, endlessly writing, different words on new pages each day but words that would – will? – I believe(d) suddenly click my locked life into motion? That “finding myself” in Whitby has been a further dissolving of myself, leaving an existence that is absurd. I read, in La Peste, “they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.” A girl looks at me several times. Should I let loose my all-too-automatic chatting up? But what would I say this time? ‘Hi, I’m nobody, I’m between lives – do you fancy a drink …?’

I go out. My bike’s been stolen. I walk to the pub where I’ve arranged to have lunch with Planning School contemporaries, now in their second year at work. They are fitting in, finding their places, playing the cards they’ve been dealt, getting on with developing meaningful lives. (Were their lives ever not meaningful…? Isn’t it only mine that has always felt so?) And I find myself envying them, their seriousness, their hope tempered by realism. John’s enthusiasm for rock climbing, Ken’s uxoriousness and growing family, Pete’s careful long-term renovation of his house. They are friendly, relieved that I haven’t found the magic formula, escaped into another life, that I’m just hanging around, outside this life. They look at their watches, time to get back, the grindstone calls, etc, handshakes all round, we must do this again some time, what are they saying as they walk away, heads together…?

I have nothing to do. I wonder where my bike is. Should I steal one? If we all did it, there’d gradually develop an informal White Bicycle scheme – pick up, use, leave. Not possession but circulation. Our society doesn’t work like that. To have and to hold.

I walk across in front of the Town Hall, and a nun, in full black habit, white wimple, asks me if I can teach her to walk on stilts. As a matter of fact, I can (I used to spend hours clumping around our yard on stilts I’d made myself), and show her how, she’s a quick learner and is soon pegging across the square. Having found my place in the world, my role, even if just for five minutes, I walk on, not looking back, I’m round the corner before I ponder whether I’d been filmed, what street theatre or performance art I’d been part of, why I hadn’t engaged, might have become part of …? so locked in my isolation.

Sitting in front of a cup of tea in the railway station buffet, looking around, at the regulars, clinging on, and the travellers, passing through, a man sits down warily opposite me, cheap clothes, dirty collar, I realise I have become one of those the misfits head for. ‘It’s hard. By the end of the week, thirty shillings for rent, fifteen shillings for food, there’s nothing left, just coppers.’ I’m waiting for his line. ‘Coppers can be rare. This one,’ he produces a well-worn Victorian penny, ‘might be worth pounds.’ I say, ‘I’ll give you a pound for it.’ Suddenly suspicious, sly look, ‘why, what do you know? You know it’s worth pounds, don’t you?’ Indignation rising, ‘You’re trying to cheat me. He’s trying to cheat me!’ to the regulars around. I protest that I’ve no idea what it’s worth, probably only a penny, I’m just giving him the option, but the mumblings are gathering, and I flee.

In the College bookshop, staring at spines, a hand on my arm. Melanie. Oh God she’s so beautiful, I so love her, my heart plunges to the dead centre within, why now? Her breathless, ‘how are you?’ ‘Fine – and painting going well?’ ‘Really well.’ ‘Still the steady man?’ ‘No, that’s …’ mumble mumble. ‘Are you here for the show?’ Third year’s work. A lot of it I don’t get, but there’s enough, of the pop imagery and content, the word- and idea-focussed work (called conceptual, apparently) for me to see where the work I was doing in Whitby, that I’d abandoned, might connect. Too late. ‘I’m doing etching now. Come up and see.’ How sweet that she doesn’t get the reference. Entering the room she stills. She lifts the plate, etched through the waxy ground, images reversed, reverently, places it tenderly into the acid, fumes rise, and absorbedly she clears the bubbles, with a feather. An eagle’s feather? She’s gone. I slip away.

After they’ve all gone to bed, I read, again, Canto 3 of Inferno. Rejected by God, but not accepted by Hell, they are the souls who are ‘nowhere’. Because of their cowardly refusal to make a choice in life, have lived a life without praise or blame, they are condemned to rush forward endlessly, stung by regrets, and envying every other fate, whatever they do not have. “The world will not record their having been here.” And that is me, drawn this way and that, doing something but when it gets hard, or when something else attracts me, giving it up, forever beginning, never committing, fearing failure more than wanting success, because I know that, worthless as I am, any success would be no success at all.

I will get a proper job, and commit to it!

5 Feb, 2003. Hill Town.

I cleared mum’s bungalow yesterday. The charity furniture people took some, the rest I had to break up and take to the tip. Including the chair she hardly moved from in three years. Uncomfortable. Ill at ease. Dogged. Her laboured gasping breathing in the hospital. Last night I dreamed (again) I was trapped in a tunnel unable to breathe, my terror of that death. (Being pressed to death. Gripped by a python – it doesn’t squeeze, it tightens each time the victim breathes out, before they can breath in.) I imagined her last days in a nightmare of being trapped in a tunnel of panicked asphyxiation as her lungs filled with ‘malignant pleural effusion’, as she drowned from the inside. I was glad I’d agreed to them turning up the morphine drip, to killing her. The furniture bought quickly when they moved from the caravan, cheap and practical, without resonance. They had got rid of a houseful, a lifetime’s accumulation of furniture and decoration, when they’d moved into the caravan. From house owners to caravan owners to council tenants in ten years. A strange descent. She had kept just one photograph of dad (her husband of 45 years), passport-size. Perhaps a touch of private humour : the first thing she did after the funeral – ‘I told them to put his ashes on the roses. He liked gardening’ – was to get a passport and go on the holiday in Switzerland he’d promised her and never taken her on. So much light from uncurtained windows, empty rooms so big, full of promise and potential. Now, with shapes on the carpet, on the walls, full only of absence. The bungalow echoes with absence. With dad, the song was ‘Independence Day’, ‘Well papa go to bed now, it’s getting late, nothing we can say is going to change things now’. With mum it’s ‘My Mummy’s Dead’. Absence. The starkness of obliteration, loss, emptiness, something rubbed out, a space, whiteness, leaving a bewildered orphan. I find myself turning round and round on the spot, looking for something to anchor myself to. Nothing. I pull out the picture hooks, read the meter, and pull shut the sticking door and leave. I moved them in, I saw them out, I cleared up after they’d gone.

I must get ‘Summer in France’ published! Vicky agrees, although she says I should negotiate with Jane. Although I’ve still heard nothing back from her. Robert has written an excellent ‘appreciation’, which captures its drama and energy – which my synopsis fails to do, so far. More rewrites. I’ll include his piece with the synopsis and chapters I’ll send to the literary agents.

I have my poems for the next Salisbury Poetry café. Keep pushing on!

6 Feb, 1994. Hill Town.

We survive it. No, we choose to survive it, choose not to lose the pleasure of Shirley Valentine, to have our time. I unplug the phone and bell. We go to bed, make love, I come, she comes, we sleep. She sleeps well. I have an amazing dream, go downstairs to write it out.

I’m at a gathering, a mix of revivalist meeting and New Age workshop. We’ve done some work, are returning after a break. We (who? No one I know, the sort of middle-class people I meet at self-help groups and school meetings) are working in an anteroom, separate from the main hall. It’s crowded and there’s a lot of anxious chat – do you think you’ll be able to do it? I’m sure I will, but say nothing. Then I’m aware of how crowded it is in the anteroom, how cold the floor (that feels significant), realise it won’t happen here. I assert myself, even push my way through, into the main hall. I start the exercise, tai chi walking. And feel, as I walk, not the floor under my feet, but a cushion of soft, warm air. I’m walking off the ground. Hardly have I begun to walk like that, tremendously elated, when I’m lifted up from the ground, as if there are hands under my armpits, high over the crowd. I’m walking on air in giant steps. And flying – being flown – too, swooping. And speaking in tongues. People are looking up, saying, ‘look, he’s flying, he’s flying!’ And I’m feeling elation both that it’s happening, that I’m being ‘taken up’ by ‘the power’, and that the power has developed in me, through my work, through me working. And, less good this, I feel proud of/in myself flying, swooping above the crowd, a ‘look at me’ feeling that I know I must be careful of. But allowing myself a little pride within the good, overwhelming feeling of doing it.

My thoughts? That through effort, good fortune, and – most important – at a particular time seizing my moment, taking my space, moving from the crowded lobby of well-intentioned failure into the main hall where success is possible, I have succeeded in my endeavour. And that in my life I might succeed in my endeavour. But that I need to be careful of becoming too full of myself, losing touch with people (I am literally above their heads), the ground, my work. A clear, hopeful, salutary dream.

It’s 6:45 when I go back up. Stella stirs when I get into bed, says, how are you? I say, I’m worrying about Sarah. Instant frost. It takes half an hour to coax her back. What she wanted, deserved, was for me to say, as she was waking, ‘You fill my thoughts.’ We work it through. I say, it’s your turn, and masturbate her to orgasm. A surprise to her as she only expects one orgasm and had one last night. And a greater surprise when it goes on and on, until she pulls my hand away, gasps, easy, enough, I don’t know where this is going, her eyes big and round and full of shocked surprise. Anyway, now it’s your turn. I push. And push. And look. Her cunt is tight shut, as if there’d never been a slit between her legs. She laughs, your face! Ingrate! I rage between her legs, I give you the trip of a lifetime and then you shut up shop! And collapse onto her mumbling unfair, unfair, unfair. Wank on me, she says. She lies back, legs spread wide, hands behind her head, enjoying my Shiele contortions as I bring myself to orgasm and come over her cunt. She rubs it in and I take her in my arms. Nestling there – she loves to nestle – she says, I had a lovely day with mum yesterday. (I’d seen them in the distance, waved.) Mum said, my heart did a somersault when I saw Keith – he is so like your father! I am the age her father was when Stella was fifteen.

7 Feb, 1990. Hill Town.

You’re washed up, shell-shocked on a shell-strewn beach, coughing green water out of your lungs and grabbing for breath, feeling, as you struggle up, the terrible weight of your unsupported body. It has happened. Without intention, without intent, is has happened. A brief wave washes over you, to remind you of where you’ve come from, and is gone.

How heavy you are, how still. Birds wheel above your head – slow wheeling, fast soaring, companionably chirping – but you do not move.

‘Where am I?’ You don’t know. All you know is that this is a foreign shore, a strange land. And that you must pick yourself up and start to live. Again. In the first person. Singular.

It just happened. You didn’t mean it to happen, but one day you woke up and it had happened. There’s nothing you can do about it. You just have to live with the consequences.

You can protest all you like – I didn’t mean this! Or that! None of it matters. It’s happened.

They walk like ghosts, apparelled in black, doom-laden, life-lorn, mute accusing faces say – you did this.

Homesick. I’ve moved out, no family, no home, no books, but I haven’t moved on. Marooned up here. I have to reply to her letter, but fear that what I say will resume the avalanche that my leaving stopped. How I fear her. How beaten down by her I feel.

She said, ‘do you think it will last?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘I don’t, it feels – shallow.’ And isn’t that what I want, to be out of the dark depths, onto a shore of dancing waves and friendly figures? And yet the call of the deep, the attraction of the dark silence, the pool I’ve crawled from with such effort, the sense of depth, of the mysterious, the adventurous, the unknown, the dark pool in the silent cavern and it leading down and through to some sparkling, illuminated place. How she draws me, enigmatic and dark … How commitment kept me in thrall to her, drawn ever down, the weight ever heavier. I have to write the letter. I have to break my commitment. And accept the avalanche.

8 Feb, 2001. Hill Town.

Yesterday, oh such nonsense! I printed the last page of the book and took it to be bound. Julie offered me the Stratford flat, and I see Vicky and I there for a few days, getting over our operations. In the evening to The Winter’s Tale. On the drive back, thinking about Leontes and Hermione, sixteen years apart, Félicie and Charles (in Rohmer’s film) resuming after five years, and Vicky and I, eight years since we broke up, magnets and reversed magnets, the pheromone desire for each other’s bodies, ‘I love your smell’. And the character incompatibilities. I ask if she was ever committed to our relationship. She said ‘I think I always knew that I’d never commit to you. You’re too complicated, too tricky.’ ‘Why did you pursue it?’ ‘I saw your marriage was making you unhappy, and I could help you out of it.’ And I realise that I was driven by a desire for an affair, and she happened to be there. So, the Grand Passion that broke up a marriage, the Great Love that justified it, was a man seeking an affair, and a woman vulnerable after a divorce. And I realise that the only person – or rather relationship – I committed to, was with Jane. And yet it almost destroyed me.

As I pull up outside her house, I remember the word, discretion, resist the desire to embrace her, ‘I love your smell’, oddly get out and open her door for her and stand with the door between us as, surprised, she gets out and heads for her door. I check as she opens it and waves briefly. I drive home, read, yet again:

‘To what a cumbersome unwieldiness
And burdensome corpulence my love had grown,
But that I did, to make it less,
And keep it in proportion,
Give it a diet, made it feed upon
That which love worst endures, discretion.’ Donne.

Thank heavens I never mentioned the Stratford flat.

Dear Sarah
Thanks so much for your positive response to the book. I was surprised at how well it read after being put away for a couple of years. And now I feel it’s time to write volume two. I had a vision, several years ago, of the three volumes as like a tree – vol 1 is the roots, my themes addressed but not developed; vol 2 the trunk, made up of the braided stories of the several characters; vol 3 the branches, leaves and flowers, a denouement set over a week in some future time. Vol 2 would include the liberating of the Byzant on the day of Robert Coon’s lecture in 1993. Vol 3 the removal of the Town Hall – a splinter in one of the town’s acupuncture points – at the Millennium, and the inauguration of the town’s new age.

9 Feb, 1995. Hill Town.

Dear Helen
Many thanks for your cards and letters. I loved the hints of blue and green in the hoar frost picture. And what a rogue of a satyr!
My personal life is in one of its bouts of chaos. Everything goes swimmingly until things ‘catch up with me’ (my mother’s phrase). If I say it involves Stella and Vicky, I’m sure you’ll get the drift. Excuse my reticence. What bothers me is less that I have little moral sense, beyond trying to be happy and make others happy, than that, as it’s so important to others, maybe I should have more of it, that it might serve a function beyond maintaining conventions.
I’m now back writing the story I was working on when Vicky went off with Rex eighteen months ago. Not to return myself to that time, far from it, but because that story (first draft dated 31 March, 1981!) was the appropriate one to write after I’d finished writing ‘A Summer in France’. The Vicky – Rex thing was the stone on the rail that knocked my life off track.
Now I’m settled enough to resume. I’m ever more conscious of a deep subterranean river in my self, my life, that flows imperturbably while I scrabble chaotically around up here. Away from the connection with that stream, the story just stopped. Like a spore or a seed in the desert, it awaited propitious circumstance to stir into life. It’s the story of two men who each inherit half a wood, and how they respond. I’d written the story of one, just started the other. I knew exactly what he should do, all mapped out, couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t do it. Gradually I realised that although I knew what he does, I didn’t know who he is. I needed to find him, in his world, enter that world, to observe and experience him, to get to know him. Which I’m gradually doing. He’s gradually coming to life, and acting in the way I expected him to. It’s a weird process. And, after a period of writing (very emotional) poetry in response to V – Rex, I’m now back to the long haul of prose, of turning up at the desk, being dogged etc. etc.
Although I sometimes wonder. I discovered late that my father had lived a parallel, imaginary life, entirely in his head, the life he ‘should’ have lived, with dates and everything. (Which explained why, often, he was ‘not there’ – how that frightened me, that absence, when I was small!) And has me pondering that my writing is an outered version of the imaginary life. Does putting inventions into the conventions of form – short story, poem, novel – and writing it down, make it ‘realler’ than the life that stayed in his head? Is it true that ‘writing unread is writing unwritten’? Is there validity in writing that goes straight into the drawer? But gradually my writing is going beyond the drawer (I have my passionate readers). My fear always is that being in the market, one writes for the market – especially for one like me who is so easily influenced, is so biddable. My isolation is important to my integrity. However solipsistic that is. And my work will get out, more and more. But at my pace. Which doesn’t stop me saying, when I’m writing – why are you evading life, living in a dream factory? And when I’m living life – why are you wasting time on this? You should be doing what you’re really here for! The monkey on the shoulder. The dark self.

10 Feb, 1996. Hill Town.

Vicky phoned from Sarah’s saying it had all come apart, she was drinking again, she was back three years. I went round. She was very drunk. Sarah and I played musical bowls, massaged each other, danced to Van Morrison, and drummed. Vicky said she would come home with me but didn’t, which upset me.

I was determined not to phone her, but after my shift accepted the situation, phoned, asked if she wanted to come round. James brought her, bottles rattling in her bag. We talked a bit then came upstairs, both very clear. We had sex – a year for her, six months for me. I remembered, as I always remember after the first sex for a while, that it’s not a relief but simply a change of state, that celibacy is timeless, there is only anticipation, and then instantly sex becomes normal. Our normal. She was on her back at first, then her belly. Face in the pillow, she said, do what you want. I want to bugger you. Do it. I remembered three years ago when, hardly in she’d yelped and I’d pulled quickly out. Not this time. This time we completed  it. It was the point for me at which the past changed, at which a new future was possible. And this time it was good and kind and mutual. I went right in. Arms around the pillow, me deep in her, she said, I bet it looks great. It feels really good. When I came out I washed scrupulously and we made love face to face and I came. She had a bath surrounded by candles, I made supper, we lit the fire, had a cosy evening and slept together.

She left for work on Friday. Back at five. At least now she was only drinking beer – she had been swigging vodka in the night. We went to meditation, she stopped drinking at eight, went home, had a bad night, phoned me at five, I didn’t hear – At work Ray said, the doctor’s car was outside Vicky’s house when I passed. A chaotic weekend, she alternately noisy and sneaky (bottles stashed everywhere, ‘I’m just going for a pee’ …etc like three years ago), helping me clear up for Nick and Laney coming, creating chaos, impossible. On Sunday I went round, we made love, back in the old ways, bad for both of us.

I phoned Julie, said, I’m back with Vicky. Silence. Then, ‘But Keith, the last time we spoke you were talking about addiction, that the problem was you were addicted to each other. How can a couple, addicted to each other, get over the addiction with each other?’ I mumble something about us going through the addiction, together, to a higher level of connection. Images in my head, as I spoke, of the golden couple we had been, at the beginning. Silence. Then, ‘But Keith, it’s like the alcoholic saying they’ll drink themselves to sobriety. All they do is make themselves sick of alcohol. As, apparently, you and Vicky do – you do too much, you go too far, you sicken yourselves. And when the drunk sobers up, he still wants the booze.’ Vicky came round that evening, we made love.

Several days apart, then we speak on the phone. We have both realised we have to sort ourselves out alone. She says, I love the smell of you. I say, I love the feel of you, the touch of my fingers on your skin. And just and so I stop myself putting the phone down and racing around to her house. I say, we’re like magnets – when we come within a certain distance we spring together. But then the poles reverse and we fly apart, disliking each other. And yet, now, the phone around my ear and mouth, oh the touch of her, inside her, close, close.

11 Feb, 2003. Hill Town.

The alarm wakes me, interrupts a dream about Stella. Looking gorgeous, pert breasts – bare-breasted in public, in a lilac under-cup bra. It reminded me of what fun it was. Remember these things.

A letter from Steffie saying, I’m heartbroken. Or rather, without you loving me I’m lost. What to say? I’m at a loss. What do I feel? I guess I feel – it’s a fat lot of good saying that now, four months after you let it peter out, you signed it off as (your phrase) ‘a summer romance’, after you didn’t reply to my letter.

‘Dear Keith
I wasn’t going to write (except in my head endlessly. You’ve been as much in my life as ever you were.) I’m sorry I wasn’t able to say hello [at the poetry café]. Maybe that was a relief to you, I’ve no idea. The quality of my life has changed since we parted. I can’t feel self-sufficient like I used to. It’s not like a loss. I feel damaged inside. Maybe I always was but now I’m aware of it. I don’t miss you but I miss that connection. You never believed me how good your loving was for me & how new that feeling was, but it was all true. I don’t suppose that matters much to you now, you have other resources and other preoccupations. But you were the lover I’d imagined and invented all my life and now I feel lost & that’s why I can’t say hello when we meet. It’s only the love I miss, not the life-theories or any of that. Just your incomparable loving. I feel quite safe in saying this because you won’t be tempted by such a confession & we both know there’s no point in trying to piece up the fragments anyway. There’re other things I could say but I’m aware this letter isn’t appropriately timed or welcome. That was part of the problem, not knowing how to contact you in case I got it wrong, which doesn’t matter now, so I decided to send this. I hope you don’t misconstrue any of this as blaming, I’m responsible for my state of mind not you. But if I see you again, & we avoid each other again, at least you know why. Love S x.’

What to make of it? It opens doors then closes them. It’s impossible to get into. It presumes so much: ‘you have other resources’, ‘you won’t be tempted by such a confession’, ‘we both know there’s no point’, etc. What is she saying? That I miss the fucking – being fucked by you – but ‘I don’t miss you’. I miss the sex but not ‘the life-theories’. You were the lover I’d invented all my life who became real. I realise now that I was her twice-a-week lover, as she continued her successful career as writer and writing tutor (no wonder I felt so often like an exhausted tup), when I so wanted a ‘full’ relationship. Curious. I’ve always thought I wanted a twice-a-week lover, while getting on with my life, but when it comes to it I always go all-in. And when, face down naked on the bed she’d say, ‘you can do anything you want to me’, and knowing she meant it, I’d immediately take her up in my arms, as if to save her from herself. But now she says she feels damaged inside. Or is newly aware of it. And maybe it is that at fifty-six the confected world, of her invented name, of shallow fiction, and self-indulgent amateurs on Greek-island courses, at last gave way and revealed the inchoate depths, the dionysian, that underlies her carpeted world. Or maybe I’m just pissed off that I was just a gigolo. I write an emollient letter.

12 Feb, 1980. Milford Gate.

Jane says, I’m leaving. We can’t carry on like this. It’s killing both of us. She’s been bringing the conversation round to it – I’m no good, I’m sorry, it’s my fault (how often I’ve said the same things) etc. She says it not angrily but matter of fact, without passion, all emotion burned out, dead. All that’s left is resignation, facing the fact, necessity. She says, you’ll be alright. I say, but what about him, Tom, snuffling in his cot in the corner of the caravan, he’ll be fucked up. She says, well, we were fucked up, what chance does he stand? In bed she says, I’m sorry. I say, so am I.

I wake at four. I try very hard to hate her, to blame her for the wasted years, for my misfortunes, things I’d have done differently if she hadn’t been there, the compromises. She’d said, your mistake was leaving the Planning Office. I say, I don’t know. All I know is that I’ve been unhappy for five years. I start to say, Tom was the mistake. but, no, Tom is perfect. The timing was bad, she was so certain she’d have difficulty conceiving that when it happened quickly we weren’t ready, me still on my carpentry course. No, the abortion was the mistake, it put us athwart nature; the bat appeared in the house the day after, and we were so terrified we sent in Tom, eighteen-months old, to open the window, to shoo it out. I think of the house, at the other end of the garden, our first house in England, our first mortgage, twenty-five years, that needs so much work, that I’ll have to do, every evening and weekend, a year at least. I curse her for stopping me writing. I won’t be able to write because I must stop her from taking Tom. I cry, not bitter tears but terribly sad, that all the trying hasn’t worked. I try very hard to hate her, but I can’t. I reach over. She is warm. We make love, she wrapping herself around me, a benign embrace. I can’t hate her. But neither, coming back from the extreme, can I love her. She receives me, helps me. yet, it is dead. We make love as others shake hands. There is no hatred, just a great longing, an immense sadness. I feel better. It’s the best orgasm I’ve had for a long time, a relief of tension. But no passion, and nothing after, no residue. It’s all burnt up. We’re at the end of passion. And yet, on the far side, beyond the ashes of the fire of desire is – something, an affirmation, a spiritual connection. I weep for Tom, weep at the memory of happier times – the moment, on the Greek beach, when she moved away, down the sand towards the sea, and I was filled with a vast longing for her absent self, pulling, pulling away. As I leave for work she says, you’ll be alright. Is that a question or a statement? A statement.

Outside the air is beautiful, like champagne, fresh, bubbly on my skin. sharp, mellow, full of oxygen. And I accept it, accept the reality of it. All the wishing – that I’d stayed in France, that I’d gone back toTextile City – is over. There is a situation, work to do, a life to be lived.

As I walk up the garden to the house, the guy next door walks down to his car. At the front I climb into our car as other men all along the street climb into theirs. I live here! I’m a mortgage-owner climbing into his car to drive to work! A few cars on the narrow street, more cars on the wider street, then into the stream of traffic on the main road to the city. The stream of life, and I am once more part of it – five, ten years behind my contemporaries, smaller house, smaller car, but in the stream. I almost feel pertinent, relevant. How easy is this flow, how one is carried along. And yet, did I not determine not to travel on this great highway of the given life? Up to now I’ve kept off it, travelling by-ways, experiencing the detail of my own made path, the individuality of those experiences, my individual, created life. I must not forget that, I say, as I pull into the building site.

13 Feb, 1966. Oxbridge.

How to draw how I feel? How to draw myself self-contained, focussed on one end – riding faster on my bike, achieving climax when masturbating – seeing nothing, aware of nothing outside my focussed intent. While at the same time observing myself acting; but not separated, the acting self and the observing self both within, within me. Everything outside me is contingent. I fill the world. I am the world. I feel extraordinarily powerful. Nothing is beyond me. I am whole. I am in ecstasy, perfectly full, perfectly empty – as at Mont St-Victoire. In ecstasy, but only aware of it when it’s gone, when I shrink, when the outside world grows, and I find myself in my place, an insignificant piece in an infinite mechanism. How to draw how I feel?

Egon Schiele: ‘he is linked firmly to the two fundamental traditions of modern painting, namely the search  for an inner, more subjective reality, and the pursuit of its expression in the intellectual solidarity of abstract experiment.’ And Jeremy writes in the poetry magazine of recording the immediacy of perception, and one’s involvement with that perception, while fitting it into a meaningful frame. Writing is so difficult, and yet I feel I know what I want to do. And in a strange way that I know how to do it. My autobiographical novel is taking shape. It will be centred on Mont-St-Victoire, and I will start with a long and complete description of everything that happened there. Then I will move backwards and forwards from that pivot point.

So much has happened since last summer. Contrast my youth, round and whole, but uniformly grey, with my life now – fragmented, flashes of beautiful moments, but also shards of great despair, the wholeness broken up, not yet re-formed. I have now a vague glimmering of the road I must follow, linking individuality and social responsibility. But in order to help in the community, I must know how to be an individual. Recently the search for myself has occupied the whole range of my vision. But only through knowing myself will I be able to be socially useful.

Thinking about the summer. Too much of my social life has been in River Town. I need to break away, less from my family than from the comfort of my home-town world. Can I achieve in the summer what I want, my instrument of breaking away, writing my novel? If I can’t I must leave, take off. There’ll be plenty of summer jobs, it’ll be warm enough to sleep out, I’ll travel, work when necessary, bum around.

As libido returns (amazing how intellectual activity leaches it out), I think of Cathy. It wouldn’t, couldn’t work. And yet I’m ready to try. I imagine meeting her casually in the street. But, ‘You want to have your cake and eat it. You want God to arrange for you something that you know would be wrong for you to have if you chose it of your own free will.’ (McCarthy, The Group). But she is so beautiful, so serene, so innocent – and yet already 20. I know in my heart I will call on her. And that thought is followed by a flood of images of the things we will do ‘together’, plays, concerts, walking in the Lakes. … Perhaps. Perhaps.

14 Feb, 1977. London.

I come home to a silent flat, Ken is out with the band. Beautiful. I spend the evening noting Bouvard and Pecuchet, feeling myself grow in strength and independence. The simple fact of being alone with books and ideas, the freedom to be silent, to attend only to what I want to, the absence of noise around me, privacy. By the time Jane gets back, flushed and talkative after an evening out, I am self-contained, impassive, together, in control of myself, inaccessible. But to her it’s a big deal, fourteen days since her period, sacramental sex, procreative sex. To me its duty sex. I’m so pissed off with evenings of boredom in which I can do nothing because we’re stuck in one room and she is alternately inert, and banging around in bustling activity, with an edge of wildness, whites of the eyes stuff, when she might howl at the moon or stick a knife in me. She makes a Valentine. The only one I could make would be a red card with an empty heart. Next day she says, archly, ‘I suppose you know that last night was a rather special time for me’. So she can go out and be bouncy and outgoing because tonight’s the night. I say the wrong thing, and she goes for me, ‘Oh I could kill you, Keith Walton!’ And with a knife in her hand she could have. Then she goes for a walk and comes back from the outer reaches of nothingness and wildness, gradually coming to, well that’s life, there are worse men. She asks me about my cruelty, my way of homing in on people’s vulnerabilities, opening them up, because I can. She hasn’t decided, she says, if with her it’s just cruelty, or a method of domination. ‘If it’s the first I can live with it. But not if it’s the second.’

In bed, she noisily asleep, I try to make sense of it. And it doesn’t make sense. How did we get to this? Seven years, in which she’s embarked on careers, I’ve had jobs; she’s learned skills, I’ve made notes; she’s got on with life, I’ve continued to prepare in the antechamber; she’s used her education, I’ve disavowed mine. I am alive with potential – everyone sees it – which I always fail to realise. I let them down and, as they see it, myself as well. Jane thought she was getting together with a writer in ovo, and rather liked the idea; she got a dreamer. I wasn’t educated, I was trained, to pass exams and to be plausible. I emerged from sixteen years of education a well-trained cipher who’d lost himself in the process. I need to spend sixteen years forgetting the training, finding my intelligence, my self.

But, meanwhile. Why does she keep me, not dump me and start again? Our commitment. The ring. (Our ring, not the wedding ring.) and the clock ticking. Getting a return on her investment. So. Forget returning toTextile City and a lads’ world – they’re all now married, that ship has sailed. Forget Gabrielle and the mistress idea. Forget France – we’ll have, anyway, to sell the house to buy in England. I will make her pregnant, I will train as a carpenter, I will commit to keeping a family until she returns to work, meanwhile writing in any scraps of time I can scrounge. And then …

15 Feb, 1997. Hill Town.

On Friday to London. On the train, getting closer, entering a web, a mesh, an ever more complex world I’m not part of. But remember I chose not to be part of. Enter, take what you can, leave.

Braque. He begins with precise observation, what is. Then manipulates form, colour, texture to create the shapes and surface he wants. I want to understand how he manipulates data to make a point, create a world, tell a story. What stories am I trying to tell? Formal decisions. A jug divided, one side painted in fields of colour, one in jags. To suggest light falling on that side? To destabilise one’s looking, resist attaching a quick label, one needs to deconstruct and reconstruct? The corner of a room. For all the distorted planes, this is a real place. The wall, old paper, damaged panelling. The stove and bucket are central. The stove painted in detail, its cast patterns, iconic, heraldic – but ‘avoid looking for symbolism in his paintings – he refuses to think beyond the thing, the image.’ The bucket depicted in splodges of colour. The concern for surface-effects from his house-painter days. The bucket is empty, the stove cold, the flashes of yellow in the wall are acid and cold. The anecdote is, this is a bourgeois mansion fallen on hard times, now an artist’s studio, in the War. And ‘Echo’, the jug so fractured, fragmented, taken apart, looked at, thought about, then put together such that it contains, expresses everything about the jug, the fullness of form, the fall of light on it, its function as a container, its weight and presence, so it is so much more than a jug. ‘I put all the discoveries of a lifetime into these pictures.’

I come out not existing as myself but as an adjunct, an aspect of the paintings, a living, moving being saturated in the exhibition, feeling myself, but also the calmness, the monumentality, the quiet heroism, the concentration, the endurance, the staying with. I sit with a pot of coffee. Looking.

Leaving London, suburbs, places I might have planned. What mark did you leave? Even just in a corner of Hortonly.

On Saturday to Poole. Water lead grey, white splashes as it breaks on rocks, light hardly carried, sinking. Six spans of grey, a wall, the first black as coal, a coal face intricately notched along its crest. The next less bold, dark and solidity too have leached from it. And back and back. Each with body lost from it, light added, as if it’s disembodying so there is space for light to enter, to suffuse through, to glow in it. Loss of substance is gain of light. And beyond the light is the sky itself. I sit, in thin jacket, feeling the penetrating cold, sit for a long time, looking. Geese crop grass, cormorants fast flying, black, two vivid swans beating across. I get stiffly, up, begin to turn, ‘Oh I wanted you to carry on sitting there, you were part of the scene.’ What, for a photograph? ‘No. Just looking.’ So I look at bay and beach, and see a black-clad silhouetted figure, not there to record the moment, even experience the moment, but as part of the scene. She’s middle-aged, ordinary looking, maybe a teacher, probably loves Casper David Friedrich. We chat for a while, about not much, and I say goodbye and walk on, feeling, useful. For several minutes I filled a role far from my purpose, thrilling because of that.

16 Feb, 1999. Hill Town.

I began the Gold Hill poem. It came to me, the need to start it, yesterday evening, out on a walk. I’d crossed the street to look at the flowers, and was rounding the corner by the hairdresser’s, looking across at the Town Hall and saw – that I have to write it. I cross the apex, onto Park Walk, grey and winterswept, and realise I have to take it on, this task, this piece of publicity for an idea, this publishing of an alternative vision, a dreamed view, of this town. I falter, say, why me, why another task to take on? But I’m in William Carlos Williams mode, say, fight the bastards, say what you think, express it.

To Carol’s We talk, of childlessness, she cries; of only children, I cry. Why do we meet? She says, you frighten me with your intelligence. I say, you delight me with your innocence. But I want us to be friends. Twice I embrace her, she neither responds nor resists, waits. It’s important not to come on to her. I give her the poems, leave. Next day a phone call, we’re okay, she loves the poems. ‘But I don’t want it to go any further,’ concern in her voice, but, okay, we’re friends.

I feel mildly sick as I open the envelope from Jeremy containing the magazine with my first poems in print. I read my poems with the same nausea, feeling nothing, no sense of pride, achievement, wishing only that they were better, or at least different, the nausea that they are fixed, can’t be different, they’re set. They’re not even nebbish poems. (Nebbish, a person who, when he enters a room, it’s as if someone has left.) Just there. Nothing. And I realise that what I’d feared, that my interest was in the dream of being a published writer, not the reality, is true. In the dream I swam with the leviathans, on their level, in all their magnificence. Now I have my place, a three-poem poet among thirty poets in the magazine among dozens of magazines, a bottom-feeder in the churned-up mud looking up at the leviathans passing above me, silhouetted in the sunlight. And this so I can write to long-time friends, variously successful, but with real achievements, who are about to give up on me, that oh, by the way, I’m now being published in small but influential magazines …

And also the sense that having for so long floated free (and free to dream, and so be anyone in any situation I imagine), that I am now someone, having a shape. I’m now a cog, clicked into other cogs, shocked by the pressure of connection, the friction and momentum of relationship, part of something. I remember with such nostalgia, ‘Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go’. And that liberating sensation, rising up on the ever-rising bridge, that I was part of nothing. Free. Now I’m located, defined.

But more than any of this, holding the magazine, alone, I want so much for there to be someone, in front of me, looking back at me, reflecting me back to myself, reassuring me and validating my existence. I want to be in a relationship.

17 Feb, 1986 On the train from London.

Many greys. Ten years. But no time has passed, I have not changed. And no need to revisit because the past exists only in my imagination. Many greys, rat life for most, and for the others the humdrum, expectations, and the denial of the unexpected. Nothing has changed – sticky morning-after kisses on the Tube. ‘I like your idea for a presentation’. And no regrets. Except regretting that I’m not a different person.

Men in black with orange waistcoats burn black wood in orange fire by the track. Not lonely. Not wanting. Except the capacity to make a peace in which I can create, can flower, can bloom. How uneasily those words come now, to be mocked by others and spoken guiltily by me.

None of that for George, or Helen, or for Ted with his careful examining of each experience and his thoughtful response. A house solidly functional, every square inch used, dense with acquisitions that might as well be labelled with provenance and significance, as in a museum, accumulated evidence of a marriage lived. And so little air. And a marriage curated by Helen in album after album, every incident fixed and pinned down to black paper by white words. But Ted’s photos, when he was on his own in California, live, they rest on the page, vibrating like butterflies; when Kaye turns the page, smooths it decisively flat, they go where they will: when the page is turned back, there they are, quivering with pleasure. What an affair he must have been having!

A world flashes past, black streaked with white, snow. How spacious it is, after London. Heading back. Wondering what Jane has been arranging, plotting while I’ve been away, failing to be unfaithful. A sense that the stalemate, the log jam of the last five years is beginning to loosen, maybe breaking up. I work to create this house for her – when I finished the dresser exactly as she wanted, all waxed and smart, she said, ‘what about all the other jobs you haven’t finished?’ When I said I was going to London, she took it calmly, even nonchalantly. All these years of her clenching too close, I’m suspicious of the loosening. What is she up to? And yet wanting, demanding that I get on with writing, ‘when are you going to finish something!?’, while paralysing me with her jealousy of me writing, her wanting to be in the writing room with me (how she hates that closed door! How she wants to go in, read every word I’ve written, possess it), to be in the writing process. How she has to know! But she’s looking around now, planning something. Or at least open to offers. Yet I continue to carry her always with me. And I don’t know why. Faithful to a promise? Why can’t I leave her behind, get away from her? Because I have to come back to her? Because I want to take her with me, have her with me? Because it comforts me to feel guilty? I should be aware, protect my flank. But I know that I will always end up underneath the avalanche.

18 Feb, 1994. Hill Town.

Sarah was very croaky this morning on the phone, so I took her three oranges. I was idly juggling them when she came to the door. She said, ‘this morning I imagined you juggling us, the three of us.’ ‘I probably am. Although I don’t like the sound of “juggling”.’ ‘Juggling is fine, keeping everything in balance.’ ‘Maybe my problem at the moment is maintaining connection without attachment.’ ‘Attachment is a lovely word.’ ‘Yes, but it’s connection that’s important.’

Stella phoned, ‘I have a client at 10, then one at 12 – I’ll be over at 11. Bob has agreed to a divorce.’ Straight upstairs, we make love deliciously, illuminated by the sun-filled skylight. When she comes she laughs and laughs and laughs, and the laughter is good. She scoots off. I miss her.

I read, “C is the spear through which I [God] have opened your heart.” Harvey writes of his heart not broken up, but broken open. And I can read my heartbreaks in this way. The heartbreak following Melanie’s leaving opened me up to changing my life’s direction. The heartbreak after Vicky left opened me up to writing poetry. The pain is of a heart too open, of feeling too much. After Melanie I coped by switching off feeling, of becoming insensitive to beauty, to the feelings of others. Since Vicky I’ve poured it into poetry. And this time I’ve maintained connections, added to them, kept the oranges moving.

And yet …

I pass Vicky’s house, see Rex’s car there, a sudden rage, to smash a brick through his windscreen, to beat myself up for having opened up to her, even in my imagination, to the pain of the thought of experiencing a spring, the coming spring, without her. I scribble a note. ‘I know I shouldn’t say this but I miss you like crazy and always will and … etc etc.’ Push it through her door, rush to Sarah, talk of envy and jealousy, myself an orphan, my terror of being abandoned, of not being able to believe that Vicky loves another more than me. And gradually Sarah’s absolute belief in me, her love that will never die, the mother–lover love, gives me a place to be. Believers dwell in the face of God; I dwell in the face of her love. And Vicky is no longer the centre. The world is. Later I write to Sarah, ‘I feel enclosed in your world, where I feel safe and can begin to dream again. With gratitude. And thanks.’

I write to Stella. ‘I feel your absence as something palpable, a presence filled with lack of you. I miss you. I’ve always thought of growing up as something I’d get around to one day. With you I get as near as I’ve ever got. I have absolutely no expectations, because every expectation has been fulfilled, surpassed, left far behind. I never speak to you or meet you without being surprised, astonished by something I find out about you, and about myself. I have no expectations. Wrong, I have one – that whatever happens will be the right thing for both of us, because we are good for, and to, each other. You amaze me. I cherish you and always will. Your biggest fan.’

19 Feb, 1991. Hill Town.

At the station. The air is cold, the sun is warm, warm sun shining through cold air, touching my skin. Railings extend into the misty distance. How odd, these palisades of spears. Are they barriers against an enemy, or a rack of weapons ready to hand? Is this the site of a long-ago battle? I read, “the huge iron railings, those rusty spikes which seem to stand between me and my rightful life.” I have no rightful life. Is this the world I will live in forever?

A fat-legged woman in stiletto heels. Her white-haired companion in a green-check coat, tailored, flared at the waist, with a pleat at the back, heavy plum-coloured corduroy trousers with knife-edge creases, a break at the foot, and trainers.

Yesterday, Hazel’s first words – no greeting – as I walked through the door, tool-bag in hand, ready to resume the work after a week – what brought you and Jane together? I say, I used to think it was our intelligence, our compatible, comparable intelligences. Now I think we were two lost souls who each thought they had found the other half of their self. So we locked together. And lost ourselves in the ‘and’.

On the train. White on white. White light from a white sun on white sheep and white grass and white water, and misted overall, a mist that whitens with distance, as if the white light we’re all heading towards, the white disc that is portal to a whiteness unimaginably brighter, is touching everything, bringing out the whiteness in everything it touches. A white bloom on frozen grass, on bushes of spun glass, on everything. Not a sprayed-on Christmas whiteness but the whiteness within brought forth. Nothing moves. Not energy, not light. All is. And then, as the mist fades, a hint of blue in the sky, a touch of green in the grass, and movement, life, returns. I miss the perfect white. As life stirs I feel, not participation, but nostalgia. Oh, oh. My father’s consumptive blood, scarlet, spraying on the white. My father’s son.

London. Bombs in the streets again. Like the early ’70s. Walking towards a parked car, a wastepaper bin that’s inert, then bulging slightly and knowing that the next moment it will explode and wipe you away. Like the volcano-watcher whose job was to watch Mount St Helens and report any change, who sees the mountain quiver and before he can move, never mind report, has just time to say ‘damn’ as the exploding mountain obliterates him.

Notice on the tube train door:
Obstructing the doors causes delay and can be dangerous. Altered to
Obstruct       the doors cause  delay           be dangerous.

Michael Andrews Exhibition. Each sky is a different colour of the same sky. Each picture is a different portrait of the same place. He sees different things, says different things, about the same thing. A way of seeing, a manner of painting, a mode of representing: he works where they meet, in the flux, where nothing is defined. He is making exact decisions all the time, but nothing is finalised, fixed, defined. He has the nerve to make a decision and then not to press it home, so there is always a space, a place in which subject and observer continue to relate, to be in dialogue. Attention. Work. The refusal to make the mark until the moment is right. Able to wait, to allow nothingness to prevail, to allow himself never to make the mark. Timelessness within time. Write like that?

His paintings are so beautiful, so sensuously rich. I want to step into them, inhabit them, move around in them, as hesitantly and yet certainly as one stepping into a world that is both awe-inspiring and a newly-made normal. Rock as hard as skulls, as soft as mushrooms, as vibrant as animals’ fur quivering with the life within. To move about in them, treading lightly, without touching. And yet with the heart-aching desire to feel it; not the place painted, but the painted place. To inhabit the painting forever, in the suspension between hesitation and decision.

I’m reluctant to buy the catalogue, because the reproductions are so inexact, and I will be looking at inexactness, not remembering exactness. But I buy it, because at some point I will have forgotten enough to feel enough nostalgia to want, to need, to experience something that is at least a simulacrum of what I am experiencing here.

20 Feb, 1980. Milford Gate.

Alone in the caravan.
I can’t I won’t go on. The strain, the pain is too great, involves too much forgetting, self-hurt, too much waste of a life, my life. I don’t know what I’ll do, but I can’t go on.  This weekend I’ve cut myself, bruised myself, made a mess of jobs, added to the mess that is the house I’m supposed to be renovating. I refuse to kill what is alive in me, but I can’t be alive in this other, this ‘real’ world if I don’t kill it. But I won’t. I may not be a writer (yet) but I am a literary person, absorbed into a relationship with art. I can’t counter that absorption, could only cut myself from it with a procrustean knife through myself. And I won’t. There comes a moment when one has to say no, and in saying it, says yes.

And yet. I have a wife, and a child. We have a house, a garden, an allotment. The wife and child are gone, and I don’t know if they will return. but, having failed to finish the house in France, and blamed circumstance, I must finish this house, whatever the circumstance. I trained as a carpenter, I work in the building trade because I failed to finish the house in France, so that I can finish this house. And this morning I concreted the kitchen floor. I did it all wrong, should have started with kitchen and plumbing, etc, etc … but it’s done – and what a difference it makes! I’m a reasonably effective bodging carpenter, able to turn my hand, get things done, etc. (Which I wasn’t a year ago.) But with none of the grace, the lucidity, the ‘integrity of the moment’ of the craftsman. The material world is too intractable, too much with me for me to handle any thing beyond ‘competently’. Any craft I may have will be words. But this house I can cope with, bodge along, get done. And to do so I must change
I should have done it differently
to: I   have done it.

Meanwhile, embedded as I am in “the dreary intercourse of life”, when every moment is spoken for, compromised, when never can I experience the integrity of the moment, I must not, as Wordsworth was determined not to, “allow it to prevail against me, or disturb my cheerful faith”. I must keep safe the memories, of Mont-St-Victoire, of soaring hen harriers, for when I can, at last, once more, sit at a desk, face and plunge into the empty page. And meanwhile must protect myself from, keep at bay, Jane’s dread, her paralysed and paralysing fear and panic at the physical work needed here, must prevent her lack of faith in me leaching away my precious (small) reserves of self-confidence.

While, oddly (and remembering Wordsworth wrote “us”, not “me”), through all this acknowledging, accepting that I still have faith in ‘us’. In the car, I was singing “I gave my love a cherry”, and the second verse, singing, “the story of I love you …”, and burst into tears. And remembering I have loved her, that she gave me my life, that “when I was deep in poverty you taught me how to give”. And see what survives the completion of the renovation of this house.

21 Feb, 2000. Hill Town.

Frost. Still. Clear moon. Everyone has commented on the full moon this month.

I sent off corrected proofs to Sam and Jeremy. That’s six more poems published, and several out with magazines. And at the moment I should be pushing on with poetry, to become better known, I return to prose, to narrative. A change less of medium than of mind. That with the busyness of my life, I haven’t the time to create the stillness, the emptiness, to make available a space in which a poem may emerge. My life is narrative. The ongoing negotiations as union rep. – with more problems from the members than the employers. The aftermath of mum’s fall – from a ladder, at eighty! – a fit woman suddenly become an invalid and needing carers. Helen’s problems after her accident.

A message from Vicky: ‘I found myself thinking about the swan book.’ Years since she’s seen it, and affirming that my writing can stay with readers. And  saying, ‘we need you to write about the moon for us.’ I tell her the new book will be full of the story I wrote long ago, of the young women who travelled to the moon and discovered there – because they had come a different way, with different preconceptions to the insulated military astronauts – a different world, that we may learn from. And a letter to Helen about moons. And realising that, with these women long known, I, we, have passed through the sexual. We are now friends beyond the sexual. Which makes me feel better – or at least more accommodating – about my lack of libido. However tempted I am to regard libido as an appetite which, if it isn’t there, needs stimulating. I should just be grateful for the peace.

And in my letter to Helen:
Beautiful full moon tonight.
Sometimes I think the only sensible way to count one’s life is in full moons. In the Parthenon, thirty years ago, when one could still go into the temple and it was open for the three nights of the full moon. Lying on the deck of a boat from Heraklion to Piraeus, in the middle of the circle of sea, the moon sinking as the sun rose. In our vines in France, with Gabrielle, sun and moon in perfect balance, and us, she and I, at the point of equipoise. A total eclipse from Melbury Down, with our ‘Spheres of Destiny’ group, the moon blood red in a blue sky. And with you,  on the water at Aberaeron, fracturing and then becoming whole.

‘Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut, only to discover there was nothing to steal.
Ryokan returned and caught him. “You may have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you cannot return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”
The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.
Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow”, he mused, “I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”’

Much love and tender thoughts.

22 Feb, 1966. Oxbridge.

I have survived. I have come through. The change of state which is unhappiness is completed. I am now living at a different level of reality. Where I struggle, there is no help from the world, no beauty, no love. I am alone. I walk through town, examining people (girls) objectively, critiquing each one. The sun shines violently but the air is heavy with moisture, my skin prickles in the heat. I walk into the sun, my eyes screwed up (and yet right eyebrow slightly cocked) and look at everyone. It’s like walking uphill. Then I turn onto another street, the sun behind, I am safe, they can’t see me, girls pass with vague smiles because they can’t see who’s looking at them. Now I’m walking down hill, the wind behind, I dominate, I am confident. And yet the feeling isn’t as good as against the sun. Because I feel no fear, therefore no sense of overcoming, of achievement. I see a gargoyle with a drainpipe jammed down its throat. I think of lion-tamers and whips and electric shocks. The sun shines bright.

I read about the ‘New Novel’ in France, of minute, objective description, because the aim of the novelist should be to produce something autonomous, from nothing. ‘Before the work there is nothing, no certainty, no purpose, no message.’ ‘The world is neither meaningful nor absurd. It simply is.’ ‘All around us, defying our pack of animistic or domesticating adjectives, things are just there.’

I don’t share this view. Objects vary in the way I see them. They may be unchanging, but what’s important is how I see them, at this moment, and their effect on me. Sometimes this painting is the most sublime thing in the world. Other times it is meaningless. Objects vary with my mood. It’s only when an object is meaningful to me that it’s worth writing about. The value of pure description is when it is a description of its effect on me, not of the object itself.

At last my autobiographical novel is taking form. It will be centred on Mont-St-Victoire, and begin with a long and complete description of everything that happened. Then I will move backwards and forwards from this pivot point. I won’t go to America this summer, I will write my novel.

Cathy, all my thoughts are of Cathy. Maybe I will meet her by chance on the street …? But ‘You want to have your cake and eat it. You’d like God to arrange for you to have something that you know would be wrong for you to have if you chose it of your own free will.’ (The Group p159) I will go and see her. And then the flood of thoughts, of ‘doing things together’, to plays, concerts, walking in the Lake District ….

Joan’s gloves are heavily scented, with eau de cologne and face-powder smells. I remember I had a scarf of Madge’s, that I kept in the pocket of my mac hanging behind the door at the cellar head. I used to take it out and smell it and it smelled good and I wanted her so much. These have no effect. Maybe they smell different? Or maybe I do.

Dear Joan
Your gloves. I was glad you came up, I enjoyed it very much. But thank God for periods!
I hope you are enjoying life, as I suppose I am in my stoical dissatisfied way. I got through my mid-term depression reading La Nausée and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Sartre gives me acceptance of the present, the now, its nauseating isness, and the strength to bear it. Nietzsche gives me Romantic hopes of progress and change – the future begins to exist once more. When the future ceases, that’s the time my life ceases to be worth living.

I looked again at my drawing of you. It’s beautiful. It’s you and you are very beautiful. It is the essence of you.
See you
Keith

23 Feb, 1997. Hill Town.

A strange moment. An epiphany. Sat opposite me in a nook in the new café Vicky said, very quietly, in a small voice – she seemed to have got smaller; not shrunk but perfectly smaller – the caressing, sing-song voice she sometimes has, that can cloy but this time doesn’t, caressing the words and then falling to a silvery silence, ‘she’s very lucky to have Jonathan’, looking down, far away, for just a second, then resuming the conversation, my protestations, ‘Gill is very attractive’ (how I desire her) run over, ignored. She’s very lucky to have Jonathan. And it confirms what I know, what I live with okay, observing without involvement (apart from my jealousy, and my habitual envy of all love that is not for me), that she loves him. Powerfully, tenderly, deeply. I remember a long time ago her saying that Jonathan had had ‘a bit of a fling with Liz Mulligan.’ And unspoken, but within what she said, either – and so did I, or – and I wish I had. It didn’t matter which. Although I’d wanted to know, out of curiosity. And I remember collecting her at the station on her return from Atsitsa, where she had met Rex, when we were still ‘a couple’, and seeing her happier and more beautiful, more herself than I’d ever seen her, ever had made or could make her. And I remember our first embrace, in the Post Office, which for me was so intense that I saw ever after our footprints burned in the wood, the water on the cleaner’s mop fizzing dry over them, and she not remembering that embrace. And I realise that although by knocking me off the rails she enabled me to write in a new way, become ‘a writer’, I have never written about her, only about the effect of her. A muse, but not, for all our love-making, a lover. And here we are now, fellow group members, composing together a piece for South West Connection, in a relationship without trajectory, existing in a steady state. But the moment in the café knocked me for six. Not because it was a kick in the heart (Rex had been a kick in the heart), but because it was so moving, to witness the love and the wishing and the sadness of a woman’s lost, never been, love.

24 Feb, 1999. Hill Town.

A hard frost, the sky clear, many stars, then in the pink dawn light, vapour trails; and as the sky turns blue, two create a white saltire. Deliberate? On a walk last night I saw how close Jupiter and Venus are to each other, Jupiter approaching. They will come together this evening, the first time in 20 years, not again for 17 years. I’m excited. Jupiter and Venus the brightest planets, Jupiter dashes around the sky, Venus stays close to dawn and dusk. Zeus and Aphrodite. She born from the sea, from Uranos’ castration by his son Cronos, who goes on to preside over the Golden Age, when mortals lived ‘without sorrow of heart, and loved by the blessed gods.’ Zeus and Aphrodite’s child was Priapus.

Vicky calls, back from London, sad at being alone, sad after a meeting with friends from her first teaching job, that they have such sound marriages, and are enjoying now the benefits of long-term professional incomes. One was driving the sports car her husband and children had bought for her fiftieth birthday. It’s the same with my university friends. I say, you and I prioritised our self-development and individual fulfilment over commitment to marriage, refused to make the compromises necessary to keep a long marriage going. I don’t add – and we both believed we’d leapt out of unhappy marriages into the perfect relationship, which was reward for the continuing integrity of our search. A relationship that our continuing lack of compromise wrecked, a wreckage that we’ve been living in, trying to make sense of, for eight years. And yet this year, with sex off the agenda, and the closeness of intense friendship consolidating, perhaps we are finding a way? She mentions a gîte in Sarlat, available in June.  Heading out for a bike ride, I decide to call on her, surprise her. I enter, take her in my arms, her arms are around me, her heels are off the ground, she says, I’m not sexy, I say, neither am I, that’s not what this is about. I leave, sure that my surprise has consolidated a new closeness of intimacy without sex, do a hard ride, arrive home to a landline call, a mobile call and five minutes later, Vicky at the door saying how unhappy she was about my visit, I’d broken into her afternoon, she’d been planning an hour of paperwork in the sun, she didn’t want this huggy stuff. My open heart snaps shut. Magnets reverse. I’m thrown away from her. A year’s slow consolidation gone to nothing. Surely her arms, her heels were permission, welcome? Was it pleasure followed by remorse at having opened herself up physically? But why my so strong reaction? Because, more than with anyone else, I open up my tenderest parts to her. Sagittarius’s arrow. And because our ‘honesty’ is excessive self-regard.

Three days of cloud. My heart stills. A liberating stillness, like the silence when birds suddenly stop singing and one hears the silence. And I relax. Jupiter is now below Venus, and feels ‘beyond’ – as if I have experienced space in three dimensions, Jupiter’s headlong advance to Venus somehow diagonal through the sky, now beyond and speeding away.

 And Vicky’s shrinking from physicality has released a grip on me, released me to a Rilkean isolation. “She was already let down like long hair/ and abandoned like fallen rain.” Eurydice left behind as Orpheus walks into the light. But oh how I yearn!

Third prize in a poetry competition. The first one I’ve ever entered.

25 Feb, 2002. Hill Town

I phoned Vicky in Oxford. Things are very difficult with her mother, her paranoia, carers always about to quit, etc. Her father is in a nursing home. She says – I almost came down the road to meet you (she is in Shaftesbury once a week to teach) and say, please give me a hug. I say something about Acton, she laughs – oh that’s the first time I’ve laughed in weeks, you do say the right things.

To London. ‘The American Sublime’. Enormous paintings of vast landscapes, framed by drapes as if God himself had drawn aside the curtains to reveal the New World. Mountains and canyons, forests and falls, depicted as if suddenly come upon and painted by the awed artist. Visions of  a world that has waited to be experienced by men who have both the tradition of the European and the openness of the American, the combination that justified Manifest Destiny, the right of Americans to possess this land, make of it what they wanted, to make use of resources wasted on the indigenous peoples, God’s gift neglected, indeed spurned. Except these pictures are fabrications, as false as Hollywood movies. Painted at the time not of the explorers, note even the settlers, but of the tourists – that ‘cabin’ on the ridge above the Indian camp is an hotel; and the Indians, long gone, were painted in. Yet another part of the ever-renewed propaganda machine of self-justification. Cranked up again since 9/11. But they are, like Hollywood movies, breathtaking to look at, high, wide and handsome.

‘The American Ghost.’ Warhol. He came, he made, he vanished, without issue. One of his last works a self-portrait (a Polaroid, of course) disappearing behind camouflage. His pictures turn the banal – Brillo pad boxes, magazine small ads, Hollywood stars – into icons. His paintings, “surface, nothing but surface”, selling for millions, are comfort stations in every modern art gallery, ‘phew, they’ve got a Warhol!’ The Screen Tests, the three minutes (100 feet of film) just the time to unpick the subject’s presentation. As Nadar’s seconds of exposure time revealed the sitter in a new way. A porno movie – but the camera is on the face of the man being serviced, not on the kneeling man sucking him off. His shoe drawings done again and again until they were exactly what the commissioning advertising director wanted. His art pictures, when he began, go through subjects – paint-by-numbers, cartoon figures, ballroom-dancing foot positions, magazine small ads – subject after subject until one, soup cans, ‘takes’. Car crashes, most wanted men, electric chairs (‘There isn’t a thing in the world America won’t do for you if you ask for it like a man. You can sit in the electric chair and while the juice is being turned on you can read about your own execution; you can look at a picture of yourself sitting in the electric chair while you are waiting to be executed.’ Henry Miller, Black Spring, 1936.) Does the repetition intensify or dilute? It makes the subject unavoidable. Does silk-screening distance the viewer? Rather, it removes the ‘noise’ of the artist’s facture from between viewer and subject. The Empire State Building. Falling suicides. Like from the Twin Towers: but those were never shown; his are from newspapers. What wouldn’t he have done with 9/11! Stockhausen was right, events are now beyond today’s artists. An afternoon with Warhol, endlessly interesting.

26 Feb, 2012. Hill Town

An excited call from Vicky in Oxford. Just visited by Alan who, after years of being ground down by Ruth, is restored and renewed by a relationship with a former pupil. The girl – woman, this is twenty years on – has it all planned, they will live in her big house (she’s a business executive, about to be divorced), where he will have a studio and with his teacher pension at last be free to paint all day. Vicky, having feared it would be his habitual rebound disaster, is now reassured, and thrilled by the romance. Two people meet, are attracted, looks are exchanged but they are kept apart by circumstance, she carries a torch for him, he has a photo of her, from when he was ‘trying out a new camera’. Years later she sends a note, out of the blue – forwarded by his first ex-wife? – they meet, click, begin (resume?), with none of the stuff (‘life events’) between then and now. And she lives in Oxford! Alan stayed with Vicky while they ‘courted’. Hard not to be envious, especially of the ‘cleanness’ between, the stumbling road of painful encounters and the wearingness of lived life rolled flat between these two, a primrose path unsullied, all mistakes erased, the direct line from then to now. Who would it be for me? Anthea I suppose, each in our innocence then. But I have always hoped to have made myself worthy of meeting Melanie again, each now admiring of the other. Still not there, still not good enough. And how Vicky loves her friends’ romantic tales! Always excluding herself, doesn’t count (as I count) our ‘golden time’ as golden tale. And perhaps always a little in love with Alan, one-time colleague, having rejected him when they were both married, because they were married, before Ruth ‘seduced’ him (her sniffy word) from his family. Had she wondered whether, ‘sadder and wiser’, they might slowly have connected, in both their ‘post’ situations …?

The book is going well. Different to the first book. (‘The first book’! Written and published. Published!!) That was a fictionalised autobiography, elaborations around the events of an actual summer in France, with all the characters rearranged versions of people I knew. It was a signing-off, a closure on a phase of my life, leaving me free to – as the ‘I’ character does in the last words of the book – “walk on.”

This book is an invented narrative, two young men, lost and seeking, who separately through the events of a summer month in Greece are set on paths that will bring them together, thirty years on, here in Hill Town where they will accomplish their work. And the Melanie story done in ten pages, which forty years ago was filling a book, before I gave up writing it to save my marriage. All the characters invented. Or rather appearing when appropriate, when needed, to move the story on, or chorus-like to comment. And each character complete, as if there all the time, waiting for me to recognise them, then stepping forward to become part of the story, and move it along in unexpected ways. Curious, entering this forest, this city, this realm of imagination. A maze, a labyrinth, through which I lay the thread of the story and emerge not where I entered but through the centre of the labyrinth (the minotaur is the keeper of the way out of the labyrinth.) How Jane resented it, my disappearance into that world! She would question me, even search my papers when I wasn’t there, desperate not to be excluded, had to know what she could not know. No wonder I never published anything when I was with her.

27 Feb, 2006. London

Robert’s room in Wandsworth. I’m alone in this bizarre house – untouched for years, inherited from parents by dysfunctional brothers who live hand to mouth in a house worth £1.5 million. It’s like something out of Withnail and I.

A sensational dream about ? from Royal Mail (see on), I can still feel her breast under my hand, through her clothes, soft under a dark brown loose woollen top, no bra, us kissing and being (although illicit) wonderfully passionate and loving together. Where do they come from, these dreams so full of pure and yet complex feelings, rich sensations? How is it that something that’s happening only in my head should feel so mutual, with the other person participating so fully? And not necessarily ‘on my side’. What’s interesting is the objective truth of the situation, of the relationship. Even though there’s never been ‘anything’ between us. There is no sense of fantasy wish-fulfilment. Rather, that this event, this episode should, must happen in order for the world to continue to function properly, to rebalance the world, bring it back on kilter. And yet dreams don’t change actions, don’t make me change my behaviour (imagine suggesting this to her? Absolutely not) in the ‘real’ world. Although my Jungian psychotherapist used to say that if you’re dreaming of someone, they are dreaming of you. Mm. But as it won’t happen, and I don’t see it as a call to action, what to take from it? To be more loving by reminding me of the delight and pleasure of a loving relationship? But this – why can’t I remember her name?

Lunch with Robert’s friends, Dermot and Sharon, who I met last night at the party. We walk round the Common, Sunday morning cricket, football, tennis, all fiercely competitive. Yes, Dermot says, it’s all alpha males and ambitious wives here these days. He gave up work months ago, sold his house for a million, is living on stock market trading, in a rented flat, waiting for his next ‘big thing’, for something to bite. He’s interested in my life in France, but also in writing and publishing  – he’s done a bit of both. I can see them in a ruin in Kent, turning it around and selling on, moving restlessly on. His entitlement, her ambition. Sharon a pleasant girl – six children! three with Dermot – tiny, slender, elfin almost, but with a London practicality, says ‘somefing’ unselfconsciously. How does she come to be married to an ad executive in a million pound house? Then she tells of touring with rock bands, doing wardrobe, opening a food store, the usual story. He shopped there. They’re going to France soon, he’s promised to take a copy of Diggers and Dreamers and give it to whoever is in our old house. I can see him doing it. I wonder who lives there now …?

Driving back to Hill Town, into the westering sun, intense nostalgia, the despair of fruitless unhappy Sundays, with the light about to go, the day gone, evening the only thing between me and hopeless real life, missing Tom, missing a family, missing Vicky. All this in silver light, everything, roads, cars, trees, buildings silvered with this brilliant yet soft light, liquid and dazzling that turns from silver to gold, the sky changing from blue to gold, everything gilded and saturated in this solution of gold, bathed in liquid gold, the sun turning from undifferentiated fire into a golden disc then slipping down, out of sight, and taking with it all the energy, departing, so that all that’s left is memory and the approaching darkness

28 Feb, 1994. Hill Town.

Sunday a delightful and delicious night with Stella. And it felt okay, even appropriate, the symmetry of Vicky with Rex, me with Stella, both getting on with our lives in the same town. But this morning I woke and burst into tears, wrote to her, ‘The book is in the shed. Do try to read it through one day, I think there are good things in it. I hope you are better, had a good weekend, etc. I know I shouldn’t say this, but I miss you like crazy, and always will, and …etc, etc. sorry.’

What hit me, this morning, was the thought of never again being with her in spring, the thought of never, no walks on the downs, in woods, by the sea, no touch and taste and smell of sweet skin. I’d thought of this time as a prison sentence, doing time, maybe even parole for good behaviour, meanwhile put the time to good use, improve myself so I’ll be a better person when released … the thought that this is a life sentence, for life …

A letter to Helen, who is struggling to be irresponsible, in spite of having divorced her husband, being ‘free’, the kids having left home. A lifetime of being a pillar of the establishment, the centre pole of the family tent, unable to believe that without her it, they won’t collapse. Or maybe not wanting to face the prospect of it not collapsing, of not being indispensable. I try to think of some middle-aged hippinesses for her to try, but realise that when you’ve spent your life upright, anything out of true is giddy-making. Curious, someone’s need to learn irresponsibility, unresponsibility to society, but responsibility to herself, her true inner nature, buried since babyhood by training, pleasing, learned ambition, powered by sustaining, amplifying feedback loops (good and bad).

I write to her about my visit to the National Gallery, ‘I spent ages in the 14th and 15th century rooms, ‘primitive’, pre-perspective, egg tempera, lapis lazuli, gold. Stillness. Surfaces for the eye to roam over – without perspective there is no way into the painting And no need. Subjects for contemplation. Simple wonder. Not simple in iconography, symbolism, in which every object and pose has meaning. But simple in the wonder. The wonder at the God-given. Dwelling in the face of God. The openness, where one may open one’s heart to what is, the given, as expression of God’s will. Time suspended.

‘And yet what a relief to emerge – escape, even – from 15th century Florence and enter 16th and 17th century Low Countries, the exuberance, the realism, the outdoorness, hearing sounds, feeling movement, the vitality of secular life, shaken loose after the severity of focus, the demand of the eternal, the intensity of gold. The glory and passion and love in the medieval devotion, which makes our secular emotions seem small beer indeed. And yet the bursting in of nature and the bursting forth of personal sentiments, the wind and fresh air surging into the stifling airless room of devotion. Perspective gives the pictures depth, and a way in. Helped by the fluidity of oil paint. I can hea birds sing, feel the wind in my hair, the sun in my face. And this stimulates questions – how does the wind blow, where do the birds come from, where does this sea end …? The change from the contemplative to the active.

‘Life seems a constant battle, or maybe choice, between the timeless ecstasy of ‘dwelling in the face of God’, the passionate, devoted religious way; and the way of living in the secular world of nature, relationships, change, with its sorrows and joys, growth and decay, and, at the end, annihilation. Oh to be a monk! Oh to be an adventurer! Instead I sit at my desk and imagine worlds. And yet the writer’s way, of imagination, invented worlds, is a valid one.

‘Interesting that you mention the Medicis. I’ve adopted Botticelli’s Primavera as the depiction (once I’ve decoded it) of a life path, an account of my past, and way to the future (Hermes’ caduceus piercing the clouds …). And reading Ficino and neoplatonism, and then into the 16th century when scientists like John Dee were on the edge of developing a scientific method, gnostic, alchemical, mystical (traces still in Bacon and Newton), before it was swept away by Cartesian rationalism and duality, and Aristotelian materialism. That has produced so much success and so many problems. In my fantasy hours I see it developing here, in Hill Town, in that alternative future that so intrigues me by seeming possible.

‘Have fun!’