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[Luke on the train coming back from Wales] [Luke in St Albans Rd, Luke and Roy] [July notebook from trip to the Continent with my mother, father, brother, Roy and Luke in a VW campervan, a lot of sketches.] St Romain. Dead village, one millhouse with water dripping into a pit under the south end of the long tall house. From the locked church steps, looking across the road to a pasture with apple trees, mistletoe, three stout evergreens on a mound like a burial mound, strong green sunlight, strong blue shadows. - Lombardy poplars in valleys between hills. Perfect church at Aime near St Bernard Pass, Lombardy simplicity. - Film about houses, children's shelters. - Alps houses - 5th storey attic almost open at the ends, crude triangular pillars of stone hold up the roof, straw and wiggly piggly wooden balconies complete. Crude stone construction. - Italy, Alps. Dream of walking through houses looking listening watching for all the secrets, a church room, the parson and his smiling wife, I can't grasp it, only the impression of walking through houses and listening, watching their people intensely - a group of small houses, brown around a green large meadow. - At the top of the hill above our van a shelter next to a dugout in the hill, covered with poles, plastic, stones, with children's toys inside - houses are my archetype. - Slate roofs, rough bits of slate like fish's scales all different sizes, like ripples in water. Village of La Thuile. Father when he eats - sits apart, hunched over his plate, such a misery about him, I always feel accused - the movements of his mouth, like a horse, lips back - no, not exactly - a miserable hunched munching. His braces he keeps up with string - he says bitterly "I keep fighting them, they're too short." His carefully gathered information about economics, Swiss banks - we know it already - Roy says "um." He wants to do famous things, things that are worldwide, "internationally known," wants to take pictures of things that people will say "oh" about or laugh about - lives for others, but what is his own is mainly his anxiety about safety and money, the two things I mustn't criticize. I should call this, subtitle, phenomenology of hate - I'm full of spite, even my pity is spiteful. - New branches grow straight up from pruned old branches - yellow along Aosta Valley stemmed flowers light up the green. Field green and yellow - apple orchard below gone wild. - Between them, she makes the placating gestures, he makes the loving ones. - Articulated hillside in Val d'Aosta with church on top. Alpine buildings - some have the outside exquisitely finished with wooden tongue-shaped scales - painted gold or dark brown aged matte stain. - Dream sleeping in gravel. - Naming - paradox: makes things visible, makes it possible to use them abstractly, ie make them invisible. - Nr Koblenz - Bessenheim - tiles on RR station roof wrapped around make the building something round, like a bulb, grown not assembled. - What kind of abstraction the film image is - visual - got to be careful not to confuse them - eg Rain. - Book of pictures of shelters. [journal] August Hello, here's England again, looking shabby, and here's London and London tension in my belly again; I'm amazed how experience and time bunch up behind me and fold away into almost nothing. My family goes back to Canada tomorrow; I'm relieved, it's time to get back to my own life, wherever it is, but I feel a little guilty to be relieved. My mother wants to defect, live in a city, read all the books in Foyles, go to some plays, make friends with some young people. My father carries his misery with him, slowly comes to believe he's the old woman he plays at being, keeps his eye on my mother to make sure she doesn't defect even in her imagination, tries not to notice how much he looks at young women! My little brother slouches around looking bored with the two of them, dreaming about cars, maybe thinking about girls but mainly seeming to be just waiting to have some fun as a child - sixteen, but maybe much younger, embarrassed or indifferent, I can't tell which most of the time. Our three weeks in the van on the continent, comical, Roy and I being scandalous to provoke my father, partly, and partly to un-fix the fix of misery and moral gloom he catches us in. Luke yelling with pleasure. 20th August I came onto the steps at Kentish Town library, Luke hidden under the rainshell in his pushchair, tilted him to begin to go down the steps - and he shot out of the chair. I shouted "Oh baby, no!", a little shout, and he smashed headfirst onto the pavement, lay there on his stomach with the side of his face toward me, all I could see of him was that bundle of wet blue nylon. Just began to cry when I reached him, howling but didn't struggle, lay very quietly along my front, only his little face under the hood. I hardly dared look at his head, mud, no crack, only his soft hair. A woman came out of the library to where I was standing holding him. I said "Did you see that?" She said "No, I only heard you shout." She said there was a clinic nearby. I held him with one arm and pulled the pushchair with the other, but saw that it wasn't the right street. Asked another woman coming out of the co-op, she stopped someone else, another woman in a plain cloth coat. Both of them explained something to me, Luke screamed, traffic was going by crackling on the wet street, I couldn't understand anything they said. Finally a taxi stopped alongside the pub, one of the little women rushed around to him, I came behind dragging the pushchair, he had just turned off the light and was arguing with the woman. Asked me, "What happened, then, luv?" "The baby's had a terrific fall down four steps headfirst onto the pavement." He was still arguing with the old woman, "I've been driving since five o'clock, yew can't tell me ...," interrupted himself to say "Get in then" to me, flipped his window up to cut her off, began to drive off. She flipped it down again to stuff her last word in after him. Such a bewildering comedy I laughed a strangled beginning of a laugh. Luke was silent and sat, straddling my thigh, quiet as he never is, leaning against me. I held him round with both arms, loved sitting in the back seat of the taxi so worried about him, guilty, disoriented, and he so broken down. Sometimes the driver would turn around and say "All right?" When we got to Emergency at the Whittington he said "This ride's on me" and I felt foolish and blessed. On Luke's x-ray, his howling jaws wide apart, and in them, all the teeth that haven't come out yet. Sharp ridges around his eye socket, the skull plates joined by a wavy bright line that divides just above his temple - nothing of the angry red face on the white table, only a blurring around the jaw. Wide skull, narrow jaw. Tough cheerful tiny baby, I really felt he'd be fine, although I couldn't understand how he could be. Maybe disaster is always unbelievable. Now he's sleeping pink-cheeked in his bed with a big only slightly blue bruise above his right eye, just where his burn was. - In Ireland [with Roy] - we camped on a pebble beach not far from Rosslare on the west coast (past Tramore); drove the van onto the green round hillside, cooked with Luke in his cot on the grass - small body still almost immobile. Sometimes he would cry when he couldn't sleep - we'd play Joni Mitchell on the cassette recorder, or I'd sing "Sun is slowly sinking down," "All the pretty little horses," "Hush little baby," "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child." That weekend we played "What I'll give you since you ask" and I sang it to Luke and reproachfully to Roy. Singing would quiet Luke's panicky crying, and then he'd go to sleep. In the morning he sang before he cried. While he slept in the van we climbed the hill, the cliffs seemed almost crumbling into the sea - black rocky islands with foam on them, thorny gorse where here was no path, sudden silver moon-path, cold wind, Roy's black figure in a heavy sweater standing sulking at a distance. We went back to the van to bed, closed ourselves in tight with Luke, a tight close nest, pulled the curtains, the last two men in a parked car had left; the stones on the beach had made me happy and I felt reproached. In the morning we went on to Cork - Irish-eyed people in grocery stores where we bought milk and bananas, bread, soup, Irish stew? Hitchhikers in the rain. Bantry, ugly; lunch, something very good at the end of a harbour along the road, put banana peels and paddy pads into the water, threw gulls bread from a concrete launching ramp, almost sun, went on to Dingle, Saturday night, fish and hot fat delicious chips, had a fight at the shipyard, about a girl in a café, went on in the dark to sleep at the top of a high pass - at the Dingle strand, parked and cooked on the sand, Roy took Luke out to see the waves. I can still see him with Luke's little bullet-shape dangling at the ends of his arms, trusting intelligent little bundle, looking around so wisely and calmly at the wet gleaming sand, pink and grey, blue, purple evening - a pregnant young girl and her husband walked by hand in hand. I bathed Luke in the sink; a beautiful young boy in hip boots fished down at the edge of the water, caught a very large ? Roy and I continue our minuet - We picked up two hitchhikers, went up the pass with them, came down in the dark, bits of dark turquoise high in the sky above the sea, a white cloud almost straight downhill above and past us into the gorge - flat shiny small round lakes just visible, miles of descent, silence, such distance, the pass so deep and so black, the sky so high, silence over all my irritation and the trouble between us, then the long flat alongside the sea, shrubs and a narrow road, no village except in the opposite direction at the end of a cover, at last a driveway thick with nasturtiums and an invitation to tea, pious high-pitched red-headed little woman in her pinny, six children in America, four at home, the youngest a beautiful little girl stumbling in, asleep, in her nightgown. We climbed the pass again to sleep in a square parking lot at the top walled up in white cloud, and woke early in the mist to give Luke a bottle - when we came down again we found the perfect beach, white sand, pink crabs' backs broken along the iridescent watermarks on the beach, a pasture fence, shallow green round pasture hills where we spread the van's cushions and made Sunday dinner. Half a mile back, on the other side of the road, was the line of farmhouses with their sheep fields going up the hill, and then the mountains, and then clouds. Silence, cows, flat waves, Luke falling asleep in the carrycot outside, sun at last, a fight, we pack, we leave, hurry toward Rosslare, fighting all the way, arrive, there are no night boats, find a busy seapoint, quarrel, I leave, turn, go back, there's a tropical red sunset through the hedges, I get in in silence, we find a small road and a high point beside three chimneys (all that's left of a house), a railway bridge, bushes of yellow daisies, a garbage dump, above the harbour. We lie down, I'm full of bitterness but tenderness creeps into me and I move to touch him while I sleep. For a little while we lie very close, then he shifts and I turn, but something's gentled and softened in me at last. In the morning the sun shines, he takes us to the boat, the little baby and I sit barefoot on the deck in the hot sun. When we come back to London again from Wales something has changed again and there's love again - patience, affection, and I don't need to go to Canada as I'd planned with such hope and terror. Something's new, something's new! We shift and turn, fall out, fall in, tumble like bits in a kaleidoscope. I begin to trust it, and myself, not to control it? And Luke's there too, I lose him and find him, tumble with him too, love him so much and now feel my dependence on him - it's a hurt and a joy. He has a cold, coughs piteously; tonight he was enchanted with his own reflection, tired out, more and more passionate. Roy came from David sore and lonely and isn't speaking to me. [undated journal] Tuesday [I begin an affair with a BBC documentary director I meet at the BFI library.] "I'm all up tight I'm so afraid of failing sexually and even more failing basically with you. I almost said I'm going to make a film that will really wow you." "I don't want to be ..." "Troublesome?" "Troublesome. I saw your dedication." "I'm very involved. I can't say what I want with you. I only knew I wanted to see you." "I wasn't wanting you to explain." "I used to think of the whole idea of a date, knowing you're going to meet somebody at a certain day, at a certain time, and then maybe go out and do something with somebody you hardly know, was very odd and painful, but now I think it's kind of marvelous." "What made you change?" "I think the pressure's off in some way. There used to be a sort of desperation to find my one and only true love. I don't feel that so much now." "I know what you mean." - What's a lover? From the bedroom window I look down, once again, and see a man nearly at the steps, looking worried. Blonder, a new beard, a pullover and corduroy, dark blue. My face is hot, Luke's in his nighty and we meet him at the door. Stiff and shy. Luke's put to bed, I go make tea, come back to see him sitting on the chair beside Luke's bed looking at him, holding the bottle. "I think you like my having a kid don't you." I cross nervously to look out the window - he comes to show me where his car is - I can't bear the tension and reach out my right arm for him, too shy to look at him. Who's this still body? Touches my cheek with the backs of his fingers, holds me quietly. He has theatre tickets. I have a babysitter. We talk about revolution, Ireland, etc in the car. Have beer quickly in the pub. I liked the moment of rushing downstairs after changing into my long red dress with nothing under it but skin and shoes. Bad play, we agree that theatre's embarrassing. He sits rubbing my hand nervously with his thumb, what's this, dear man? You don't have to seduce me, but my stomach warms and sometimes I have to close my eyes for a second. All that can't happen again. He'll never be so shy again. On the way out at intermission I put my hand on his back between the shoulder blades. Afterwards he passes a pub - "I need it for communication" he says humbly. I say that I know something equally intoxicating, the ducks in St James, a strip of grass fenced away, across the water willows lit, Japanese because of the way light separates their leaves, makes them monochrome in the dark (he was right) - ducks swim in line between the floodlights and the bank, like cars on a nightlit motorway. His film on Jersey - "I thought it was quite ordinary" - "Inevitably you have to show how ugly tourism is." When I lie back on the grass he begins to kiss me, keeps his hands very chaste, what's on his mind? I'm caught, sucked in. When we get up to go home we walk hand in hand, I'm barefoot, in silence. I feel silenced and he is too: we lead each other. When we get home he says he can stay for breakfast, his brother's away, he hasn't the key although he drove to Cardiff on Saturday morning to get it; I was so definite on the telephone. (Simply "Have you got somewhere to stay?") Humbly again. I turn lights off, put on a nightgown, he's there in bed, dim white body glimmers as he holds the blankets up for me, he's narrow at the shoulder, wide at the hip, slightly fat; dressed, he's like a sturdy young footballer. (His nose so thin and tilted at the end, the lines around his eyes smile although he doesn't look young for 31.) "Your eyes are tea-colored, not dark brown, much paler brown." "I like it when you talk." "You have gentle bones." Says very little that's personal. Out of shyness, or strategy? Satiny sheets of skin, cool and unarticulated. He's loose and not very hard, when he comes into me his body shakes with sobs. I hold him tight to stay with him wherever he's gone, he seems to be crying. I can only touch his face. He says he's sorry, I say, truthfully, that there's no need to be, that I'm flattered, that I like all the permutations. It's good, because we're both randy and we seem to look for the other all night, until after Luke's woken us at five and he falls backwards asleep, with his hair rough and his face smooth and easy. When I ask him to put his arms under my head he does it so fast, and humbly again. Lies sadly on my shoulder. In the morning he comes in my hand on my belly while he dives into me with his hand. Mafalda comes for breakfast with Luke and him, coffee and fruit, Luke shoves a banana into his mouth, Colin eats the other one after asking Luke's permission, but Luke looks anxious. Outside the door, M says in her precise way, "So you're an adulterous woo-man now." We drive her to the station on the way to Surrey, I talk and talk, we're there too soon. [Colin takes me to visit his college friends] Rosemary in skirt, very short, black elastic underpants, and long sweater, big brisk body, big mouth, managing cheerfulness of Bergman's women. When she bends over little Finbar we see her solid bum where it solidly turns into crotch. Colin runs with Mathew, chases and shouts, looks at home, carries Luke on his back, on his shoulder, very patiently. I'm worn out with Luke's crying as we walk. C walks ahead with Lyn, talking vaguely about politics and old friends - he's careful not to flirt with Rosemary. I like her but feel like an uppity curiosity with Lyn. [photo] When we drive home it's late, we're tired, I feel he means to go home but am moony and affectionate and want him to stay. Strain, I wonder if it's to do with feeling that his friends haven't felt comfortable with me. But he buys a bottle of wine and stays, we listen to the cantata again, and the Zen, and this time he says let's go to bed, falls asleep and in his sleep shouts "Impossible!" In the morning he's up too soon, in public clothes from a suitcase (extra shoes, slippers, shirts, socks) that made my eyebrows rise. (Danced with Princess Margaret as student president at Keele!) Lies silent beside me for a minute when I ask him to, says goodbye after asking if he can come again. I feel cold and angry but watch from the window, his wrists in the sweater again, turning the steering wheel. Shop steward of the unrecognized union next year.
- Pale skin, wrinkled around the pale eyes, pale rough hair, pale beard, sad ancient look - an expression I see him in sometimes, like an old king.
Silence. We're lying on the lawn in the sun, he's got his head on the Observer Weekend Review. "It was when I packed it in with a girlfriend." Silence. "There'd been an abortion as well." "Had you been with her for a long time?" "Not very. Four months. She didn't tell me until just before she did it. She said she'd have done it anyway." "That isn't necessarily true?" "She might have kept it, if she'd felt I was fully committed." Something so unpromising, so low-pitched. It hardly exists. Dares me to be unkind, turns me hard, bright and lively, and very kind. So little expected that everything's an amazing gift, every joke, every puzzled touch. 5 October I wrote Colin a letter that said "I don't know why I think of you. Some vestigial ethic in me is uneasy, because you're no soul mate. But I do like you. I like you! I smile when I think of you." I wrote and mailed it on Sunday - then, yesterday, Monday morning, he telephoned me. Roy's mother took his name, Roy confiscated it. I stayed in after dinner, at last he called again, embarrassed and nervous as always. "How about coming down?" I thought he had my letter, but he hadn't. He'd written me one, Sunday afternoon, but hadn't mailed it. He holds his breath, he's full of grief, full of fear, and I'm excited about him. When I hung up the telephone I was full of excitement, reading Rilke, rushing into the Heath (lit up with moon, cold), stealing a rose from Monika's bush. I'm frightened and guilty, I feel I'm risking Roy capriciously for somebody I don't want much with - but I want to go to Bristol, I feel alive, I'm happy, I do smile when I think of him. We're so raw and lonely with each other, uncomfortable. He's timid. I have room to be inventive and powerful. I feel it's almost a perfect relationship, so tenuous and bad and uncommitted, and so clear and simple. I feel perverse; I feel simply happy, clear, sharp. A week ago Sunday he came for me after his seminar, tired. Said he hadn't slept. (Telephoned me at eleven, after a few pints, lonesome, but not saying so, wanting just to go to bed with me and hang on while he told me about giving his paper, but certainly not telling me that either), later said obliquely that I'd been hard and he'd been angry? Drank his pint and fidgeted comically, took me for dinner. We went back to the car, grabbed each other, and he began to cry. Apologized, and began again. I just held him and was happy. He's so unexplored and so new. I mother him but while I mother him my body warms and gentles. He comes to me: he comes into my territory, but then I have to come to him, because he can't move in it without me. I can't say what I find so good in it: it isn't him, it's our relationship. I feel a chance to be so honest and playful. It's not a love affair, it is an amazing lovely dirty weekend. I'm afraid; I feel I'm cheating, but I do it so easily and gracefully that I must be right. We respect each other. I wonder if it's Roy at the bottom of it, giving me grace for it? Roy: our complicities, a sinister uneasiness, a real guilt. We live together, we disturb each other, pacify one another, propitiate, in order to give ourselves some peace. Affection, absence, he no longer complains much and I don't either, we're glad for our separations, at least I am. He has always been courteous and kindly as he is with his mother; neither of us cry much now. I wonder sometimes whether I really did give him up when I tried to last summer. I didn't - but I don't want to live with him. Yet we have so many accidental moments, mostly funny, that I love and feel are irreplaceable. He's my real mate, there's something to lose. But I wish he'd go away more often. He's beautiful, that speckled belly in my bed this morning, his face gone young from fucking. I hate his ingratiating smile; what can I say to it? I love looking at him when he isn't looking at me. Colin I like when he looks at me, as he did on Sunday night in the car, washed open. So careful! [travel notebook] Colin's lower lip. He said "Would you like coffee or anything." I shook my head no and just smiled so that he reached for me and pulled me against the movements of his mouth almost into air so intent against my temple - hands down into the sides of my dungarees and up under my shirt brushing over waist, breasts - when we get to bed we're uncertain. The real lovemaking was back there. Does anyone ever tell you about your lower lip? It looks hard but it is not. White fine-grained skin of his freckled back. When he touches, strokes, my vulva. Rarely. When I touch myself his breathing is quicker, he's come but he breathes with me, waiting, and when I think it's long enough - patience rewarded - I keel against him and he's saying my name as if he's grateful. I'm being crisp about the awkwardness of it all but I'm grateful too - I've tested him and trusted him and he's seemed to understand that I'm not trying to take him into my power now. I've reciprocated his home made spaghetti dinner. Then he falls heavily asleep on my shoulder, grinds his teeth. [journal] October 13 Hattori's day. She says I'm catching on, beginning to feel it. [Helen Hattori my pottery teacher at the Camden Institute] Talking to Rosalynd last night about how to move out without scaring Roy, two a.m. raining and warm, we sat drinking coffee in the kitchen and were very fluent. I hadn't realized, until I told her, how independent Luke is of me - he hasn't relaxed in my arms since he was a tiny baby, he uses me and everyone to hold him up - help him reach further. He loves Roy, his face goes bright when he sees him. Already he's not my little son - I'd no idea that we could space ourselves out from each other so much before he's ten months old. I'm sad because he brightens more for Roy than for me. But even Roy he doesn't snuggle with. Little Luke - I could leave him too, I run from him as I run from Roy. But he's happy and yelling and growing and doesn't miss me I don't think. Colin. I spent Friday night, Saturday, Sunday until six, single, playful. Who's he - can't remember how tall he is, thick and solid, soft skin, broad and hard under it, embarrassed by me, guilty, fumbling, and just as truthful as he can be. I like myself with him. Dear Colin, so foreign, so mistrustful of himself and of me. I like him and all his limits, I like being his infrequent unfaithful true love. Arrived in his room, looked under his papers and found the letter he wrote me. He tells me about the ten minute painful gaps between his sentences. He says that at the moment he writes it, he loves me and I believe him although I don't care if he says so, because I know when he does. I'm just affectionate with him, smile and am knowing and think over everything that happens. We went to bed together in his deep soft high bed, slid down and into the centre when we lay together. He really fumbles me - crawls on and into me as if he's afraid he'll lose interest if he doesn't do it right away. Moves as breathlessly and involuntarily as if he were asleep or as if the slightest movement would shoot him out of action. So we lie stuck together writhing earnestly, lovingly, and not very long. He said "I know I'm not very good at it but that was marvelous for me" (The ABZ of Love in his bureau). I said "If it was marvelous for you you're good at it" and meant it, because I'm touched, all absorbed, with his guilty evasive terrified pleasure. He touches me as if he's never touched anyone before. It's pure encounter. I'm simple, amazed, grateful, intelligent, with him. - [When Roy starts clobbering me when he drinks I wait until he has a dentist's appointment and then rush Luke into a taxi and arrive unannounced at Colin's brother's place in the south of London. I go there because I know they are about to leave their flat empty for some weeks, and because it's a place where Roy can't find me. Alan is furious but they take me in.] Little girl with pointed chin in Colin's film. Olivia, I was pricked by my nearness to her childhood - either she's just had her baby, or she's about to. Gather around me: Olivia; myself unwelcome in a lot of middleclass houses, wondering at their comforts and sacrifices, feeling a secretly superior poor relation, humble and impressed, hungry for the magazines, the books (now the toys, for Luke), the manners, the ritual. It's the same! I'm little Elly in Edmonton at the Ungers' suburban house hoping for a banana, wondering at everything - at the Thiessens' at seventeen, marveling at ironed sheets in the guest bedroom - here following Margaret around offering to vacuum, wash up, peel the potatoes, as she neurotically cleans crumbs when they fall, broken by Alan's houseproud hostility two mornings ago when his face grew so hard with resentment - why? I was presuming to benefit by his sacrifices? I was so humble because I'm ashamed. Roy - pushed away out of my mind, but his wet drunk mouth thrown back crying the night before I left - his naked shoulder, back, waist, so tight, like a fish - for the first day since leaving him I've begun to soften again. - Luke, sitting on the floor, the poor relation like me, so handsome, intelligent and ardent, finding beautiful toys, patient and friendly with strange people; loving and amazed. I like him! I like being alone with him again. I make plans for a place with him, I love him. [letter to Colin written between the lines of his letter. Bullshit, Colin, why should you be sorry, how could you be responsible, what do you mean? I still am angry-humiliated with Alan for calling you although I think I know why he did it - something to do with teaching you to take responsibility for your sins - and lo! Here you are being responsible - so here's your check back and forgive me if I've misunderstood. I don't want to get into any stupid minuets with you and I don't want to inadvertently scare all affection out of you. No need for either. It's strange being here, like being a very young child staying overnight with middleclass, distant relatives, not very welcome but stubborn, private and amazed at the comforts and rituals. In spite of my (self-induced!) embarrassment I do enjoy that strangeness, it makes me prickle, it's a perverse little adventure. Luke loves it here, so many elegant things to play with, and this galloping big Rhian girl being so charming to him. I enjoyed Bill and Felicity and the kids and often think of them. In fact my running away from home last week had much more to do with them than with you. If you don't understand that, I'll tell you when I see you! - Roy on the telephone, Madeleine is here, now they know each other, those two, probably slept together - how that would have scared me last year - now? My heart bangs but more with excitement than fear. Roy's an innocent who can slowly eat up someone else's innocence and lose none of his own. I've left him, I'll lose him. Live in fear and love, or in freedom and loneliness - I don't have a choice, I tell myself. [I move into a room in Chris and Debby Day's place on Burghley Road.] [24 October, letter from Jerry not transcribed] [letter] 26 October I have a new address: 52 Burghley Road, London NW5. It's near St Alban's Road, down the hill toward Kentish Town. Luke and I have run away from home and are living in a cheap room in some pottery-classes friend's basement. I haven't broken up with Roy but have sort of left him. (Don't let Father gloat - I still think Roy is the best and most interesting man I know.) We moved out one day while R was at the dentist's, mainly because - well, mainly because, to be truthful, I'm so willful, restless, and selfish, as you know. Secondarily because R at the moment had nothing to do and wasn't looking for anything, hung around and wanted me to be with him while I was straining to get back to the outside-relationship big world. I'd been putting him off too much and he was going a bit crazy. So I felt there was nothing to do but break that dependence so he'd have to do something else. And he did soon find another circuit with some possibilities for him - a friend called Pooh who has a big house and does carpentry. He's depressed and very strange, I think a little psychotic, droops and cries and talks vaguely, has a kind of grey absent kindliness about him that I can't make out. I'm sure he'll be all right but I'm sorry to have hurt him so much. But I'm glad to be able to see a bit more of Luke - when I was always trying to get away from Roy I got away from Luke as well until I felt that he hardly knew me, and that hurt. So now he knows me - and I can watch all his new learning with a little less anxiety (most problems now are practical and I'm quite good with that kind). Luke's learning to get things by pulling strings - a yoyo and a mirror and a shoehorn are his favorite things, next to electric heaters he can rattle. Yesterday I gave him his own first pencil, very thick, wax, and held his hand to write his name in the front of a book. Then I gave him paper - he looked at both and then thumped the paper with the side of the pencil. But you could see him getting the idea. When I show him photographs of himself he smiles and shouts with recognition. Friday He's also now got his own first book, a loose-leaf photo album with strong plastic pages he can put pictures in, just his own favorite ones. He's crazy about books, always after them, but they're the wrong size for him. So this one is his size and he's learned to turn the pages. I've seen R, he's much better, much less crazy and not so grey, getting excited about plans. Luke goes to stay with a sentimental Irishwoman in her WARM house nearby five afternoons a week so I can work at my film research job and go to pottery classes - he's on the waiting list for a nursery school and I think he'll like that, 'cause he's ravenous for new spaces, toys, furniture, and just beginning to like other kids. He's still friendly and completely fearless with strange people. Roy's mother! What a well-meaning sweet little rosebush thorn - "How's my little baby, my little angelface?" and I want to say "Excuse me, this is my little angelface; your little angelface has a hangover." "How's his cold, are you sure you should take him home? Why don't you leave him here overnight? I can't bear to part with him. Shall I make him some applesauce? Can I buy you some honey? Will you bring me his sweaters to wash? Can I buy you some Vicks? Are you sure it's not too cold? Look at his pale little cheeks. Ta-ta little angleface, say goodbye to your granny, you're going ta-tas. Oooh I don't like that cough." [journal] 26 October Little pinched pots with fins growing wherever the clay's thick, they say I'm improving and I can see that I am - Patrick's keen to show me seashell forms he makes - I have a cyst under the spongy skin inside my lip - R came to the door unshaven, white, "crazy as ever" he says, whiskey evaporating thru' his skin. On Saturday he came, in the blue lumber jacket, with three bunches of long-stemmed anemones and some freesia - we walked to the Heath with Luke, sat on a bench - he was vague, fearful, absently kind - I find myself talking to him as if he were an invalid, bright and kindly - silly. He talks to me in the same way, we're a bit idiotic; yet I feel him so affectionately. He walks slowly with his shoulders bent, flips his legs forward with a sad jerk from the hip - he's thinner, his eyes have gone a dull grey and his mouth is soft like a child's (like himself as a child) - I go to hold him and kiss him soft kisses on his cheeks - he submits and then moves away - he's gone dull and fragile but none of that seems real; I don't know him! Don't know who he is when he submits to my nursey tenderness and then turns over and cries. He says "I just love you," but that's David. Where's he? I've never known. Sometimes he's fire and sometimes water - I thought about his hands, reading that palmistry book - they are the strangest hands I've seen. Luke yesterday patted and poked a piece of paper with his pencil, trying to make lines. He pulled the orange plastic yo-yo by its string, pleased when it jerked up to him. He scoots after the black cat, but Jimmy escapes into the chair. Luke follows, pulls himself up on the chair legs - Jimmy jumps onto the table. Luke all friendliness to the beautiful small creature who looks him in the eyes so mistrustfully. Catherine [Chisholm] phones twice a day to ask about Luke's cold! "How's my baby?" Whose? I think about Poppy and look forward to her. Women talk to me about children, absorbed - like fat Polly in her sculpting angel's robe talking about their shapes and how they change. I go on about Luke's new concepts. The Heath is orange and yellow, broken bitty silhouettes where the trees were solid - on Sunday, a deep blue sky and a hawk-kite circling. Wednesday When I went to Heath Lodge this morning Roy was there. I walked through the sunny front rooms, came downstairs to all the trees blazing outside the living room. Sat down and cried because it was so warm and so beautiful, still, clean and bright. It broke me down. Roy came and knelt in front of me, put his arms around me and cried, and then we both laughed. "My brother knocked me down. Then I knocked my brother down. And then we went in for tea," he said, and went off into the kitchen to turn off the coffee water. But by the time I'd left him I was angry that he's won and can keep the flat. Last night I shouted to him on the telephone: "It's not much of an alternative, getting massacred in one's home, or having to stay home night after night all night!" and hung up. But he called me back in a second. This evening I was so exhausted and irritated that I was rough with Luke for the first time since he was born. Friday Every evening I study in a fever of concentration: palmistry, architecture, pre-school education. Then I lie awake in the dark feeling stranded with thoughts on this high raft of a bed. When I begin to think nostalgically of Roy, the flat, our two years' ceremonies and inventions, I stop myself. Tonight I'm lonely, lonely, puzzling about Colin, sad about Roy, and Luke's asleep. Colin McInnes. An Aboriginal boy in a fruit orchard in Australia meets the young pre-adolescent English boy outside the farm at the river. Here he immediately undressed and plopped into the river like a porpoise. I followed timidly and, when I swam out, could no longer find him. Searching somewhat anxiously in the gathering gloom, I suddenly felt myself heaved up out of the water on his shoulders, tossed up like a pancake, and dropped with a whack on my back: whereupon he leaped on top of me so that I sank some feet and surfaced breathless in a rage. Seeing I was alarmed, he smiled, trod water in front of me, wiped the hair out of my eyes and patted me gently on the cheeks. Then he laughed, beckoned with a dark lanky arm, and swam slowly to the shore, turning sometimes to make sure I was following. There, while we had a cigarette, he gazed at me craftily, then rose, and to my surprise, stood knee-deep in the stream and bedaubed his whole body with its ochred mud. As soon as it had partly hardened, he began to trace patterns on his body which I recognized, from photographs I had seen, as being those appropriate to an initiation. He stood proudly before me in the rising moonlight, flashed his teeth grinning, then advanced, pulled me to my feet, and led me to the water. There he anointed me fondly with the slime, told me to lie down, and traced similar patterns on both sides of my body. While he did this, he examined me minutely, his hands wandering promiscuously, familiarly, but without violation. As I lay next to this boy-man by the river - he was promising me that the strength he possessed would soon be mine as well. I reached up and kissed his muddy face, but he laughed, rose briskly to his feet, dived in the stream and disappeared towards the further shore. - One evening in La Glace when I dropped by to give Gail a message: I stood below on the garden sidewalk, she opened the porch door at the top of the stairs and stood there in white high heeled shoes, dark tanned nylon stockings, a wide white petticoat so starched light and stiff around her polished brown knees - she was dressing for a date, and I stood foolish, heavy and dull, said what I'd come to say and quickly went away feeling my childishness and illegitimacy because I'd gone with Gerald to Grande Prairie for a hamburger that afternoon. It is all one, my feeling of helpless loss then and since, not being in competition with Bernice and Gail, and being so betrayed and beaten by Roy. Then - the adoration of the image, beauty I wanted, some rebellious belief in my own secret beauty and very private illumination. Now beauty and illumination confirmed, but the long adolescence continues, the grownups still exist, and those like Roy who are blossoming sooner and with more grace - not my father, but Janeen! And so I'm not quite the [undated journal] 4:30 this morning, the alarm set to get Colin to Paddington in time for the early train, the red fire bar, his sticky not very welcome goodbye kisses, the outside door closing very quietly and a long wait before the taxi came. I was glad to still be in bed, and I was glad to be rid of him. He confessed he's never spent a weekend with a woman when he wasn't relieved at the end of it; a guilty secret. Satiation - it's good. We lay on this broad hard bed, moving back and forth naked and warm talking like old friends. He said "It's so easy to talk to you in bed, and that without wine." He makes me gay - at first my tongue was tied up with my own loneliness and his misgivings ("I thought, I'll just go around and do anything I can to help but I won't sleep with her or anything"). "I've been living so privately, I've been very alive, but so isolated, that now it's all there like a barrier I can't get past, I'd need to say it all at once and I can't. Do you understand what I'm talking about?" "That sort of thing doesn't really happen to me. I wish it did." When we'd eaten and were first listening to the Creation's last side he put his head on my lap and I put my hands along his stomach and I really longed for him. He got his hands under my skirt and touched my cunt but I could feel him lose energy and I just stopped stiff and grieved, with my eyes closed and my face straining, couldn't say anything, was sad, sad and abandoned, because my body was so eager. Later when we got properly in bed and I was almost indifferent, he -. Ah, I wonder if he can learn not to be so afraid of hunger, or do I have to baby him. "You really are independent, I believe in your independence, your spirit, I believe in you," said leaning over me on Chris's bed on the floor, with the hopeful conviction in which I once said to Roy, "Being with you is as good as being alone." "My self-loathing is such that -." - Catch and save: Roy's back in his orange tee-shirt, reflected in Rosalynd's bedroom mirror in her white and black rush-floored bedroom. Then coming out of her covers, seeing the white light coming through her tall windows, the sun moving sideways to catch us. Lost unreal lovemaking, our intimate silly affectionate-desperate talk. I began it, by wanting to touch his teeth with my tongue; but I couldn't get close, I kept floating away. As we lay next to each other I thought, not about Roy or my own balking body (its slim reflection in the mirror) but about Colin's Ann Stott. "She looks like a Modigliani." "Is she fragile?" "Very." "Something I could never tell Ann ..." Her name was down for the seminar but she didn't show up. I thought I saw her leaving and thought it was because she'd seen my name down. That's where I was yesterday, I went to see her, I didn't sleep with her or anything." "Since this inquisition dream, I thought I would just say things to people, to her and you." "It occurred to me that I haven't had a holiday this year, how I load myself with work, as if I'm afraid that if I stop I'll realize ..." "I was going to write letters to all the people I sleep with telling them that I wouldn't sleep with them again." "Your letter was very warming." "It's true that you're very awkward, but I love that, and it's true that you touch me as if you're afraid of me, but I love that too. It seems right" - I cry out. Encounter. He says "It seldom works for me the way it does with you." I say "Really, really?" full of pleasure. He's silent. "Tell me what to do so that it's nice for you too." "Something that made me envious - when you said he was loving I wouldn't hit a woman but I've never given anyone anything either." "She's very bright and very sad." I felt robust, ingenious and healthy, my Degas bloom listening to that old white king telling me about his pale white Modigliani virgin, really a BBC script editor, tough enough to have an abortion without telling him, but suicidal? Hopeful? Enough to conceive. "Anyone who didn't know, didn't know you, would think you're much better off with Roy." "Of course I'm better off with Roy" - little sad lie.
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