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!’