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  About the Book

  Helen Garner’s second volume of diaries charts a tumultuous stage in her life. Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming, and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the furore that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work.

  With devastating honesty and sparkling humour, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another—how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both enthralling and uncompromising. And through it all we see the elevating, and grounding, power of work and the enduring value of friendship.

  ‘But evidently I had not understood enough, or rather, as I was slowly finding out, everything that one thinks one understands has to be understood over and over again, in its different aspects, each time with the same new shock of discovery.’

  MARION MILNER, An Experiment in Leisure

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  EPIGRAPH

  1987

  1988

  1989

  1990

  1991

  1992

  1993

  1994

  1995

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  1987

  ‘What do you write in your diary?’

  ‘Everything. I try to write all the worst things. That’s the hardest. The temptation to gloss it up. I force myself to put down the bad and stupid things I do, the idiotic fantasies I have.’

  ‘And do you read back over it?’

  ‘All the time.’

  Lunch. The company of women. This is what I need. Light and silly conversation about how to keep canvas shoes white. ‘People think the world is full of couples,’ says E. ‘In fact it is made up of triangles.’

  V’s quite a frumpy bloke, really. His body is neglected, his hair is going grey. The pale skin of his arms and shoulders is thickly freckled, those childish freckles you see on boys in primary school, a starry sky of freckles, densely packed.

  Being in love makes me selfish and mean, puts blinkers on me. I get tunnel vision. I want, I want, I want. That’s all that happens, when you’re in love. Okay, I’ve said it. I’m in love.

  O and I took a turn around the park near his house. Muggy night. A flea bite on my left side. A moon one-third full, some faint stars, a scarf of cloud drifting across the Centrepoint Tower, large fruit bats flapping between church steeple and Moreton Bay figs. We convulsed ourselves by saying ‘andiamo’ in posh English accents. In a second-hand shop window I saw a pretty nightie I wanted to buy. Always, under whatever else is happening, a level of thought and fantasy about V and what is possible. I try out the idea of a mistress, some long-term thing running parallel to his marriage. I know my ego wouldn’t accept this. When I’ve been with him I feel fed, and anxiety dies a little. Like a junkie after a hit, I am able to contemplate giving him up.

  My story appears today in the Sydney Morning Herald. On the front page: ‘A new story from Helen Garner, plus how to avoid cholesterol.’

  On the ferry V has brought a yellow plastic bag. He pretends it contains sandwiches but actually it’s his bathers and a book on Wagner by Thomas Mann. ‘I’ve got very strong ideas on individuality,’ he says. ‘I reckon the further you get from that, the less you are yourself, the more you blur.’ I say nothing, but think, ‘How does that sit with being married?’ ‘Course,’ he says, ‘that means anyone can do anything,’ and gives a short, dismissive laugh.

  At the beach O’s wife teased him and he flung sand in her face, a lot, and hard. She sat up, brushed herself off and said, ‘I suppose I asked for that.’ She walked down to the water to rinse it off. O said when she was out of earshot, ‘That wasn’t very nice, was it. What can I do to make reparation?’ I wanted to say, ‘Get down on your knees to her, for openers,’ but remained silent. He shook out her towel and rearranged it. She returned and lay down on it, looking ordinary, and we continued our conversation.

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

  I called home. M’s lovely bright voice. Thank God I had a daughter. She tells me she’s got a job as a cleaner in an office building. ‘I started on Friday. $9.50 an hour. It’s hard but I’ll get used to it.’ I was pleased it was a rough job and she had got it through her own contacts and not mine. She’ll learn the connection between work and money.

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

  ‘How greatly one needs declarations in love, and how greatly one fears them, as though they used up something that would otherwise survive longer.’ —Elias Canetti, The Human Province

  Awful evening at L’s kitchen table. His attacks on me, the truth in them, but the way he strengthened their force, and ultimately weakened and undermined their truth, by the use of irony, or rather sarcasm. ‘You’re silent,’ he says. ‘I’m not like that. It’s a powerful position, the silent one.’ I put my head down on the table and cried with shame. Sadness, soreness, regret; relief.

  M calls, laughing and high-voiced with excitement, to report her exam results. ‘I knew the mail’d be there early. So I made myself some breakfast and strolled to the post office as if there was no hurry. I got two letters and I even made myself read the other one first.’ I shower her with praise. ‘Don’t feel you have to move out as soon as you get back,’ she says. ‘It’d be good to spend some time with you in the house before we part. People have been staying over a lot. Some in your bed. But don’t worry, I always make it nice again.’

  V reads me some of his new novel. It’s very good. Dry, completely competent, full of fancies that make me burst out laughing. He reads badly, in a stubbornly unemotional voice, as if gritting his teeth to do it.

  Very, very hot day. I thought I was fine on the highway till I stopped at a motel in Yass and got out. Found myself almost unable to speak to the woman at reception. When she asked if I wanted dinner I just stared at her wildly. Trucks passed all night. Single bed, white cotton sheets. I was terribly thirsty. Drank eight cups of tea and a jug of orange juice. Wanted a beer desperately but was too stupefied to go out and find a pub.

  At Albury I bought a Ry Cooder tape. Played it over and over, those instrumental songs, the leisure and sweetness of their hesitations. The quality of his music is goodness. Absence of straining ego.

  Today I own a house. Got the key and rushed over. Hated it of course. No sun to show its many light sources. Phone went bung after one call. All windows seem to look on to brick walls. Plants in the garden ugly and neglected and worthy of euthanasia. I began to panic
till I stood in the backyard and felt its space. Went again in the early evening, to water. Extreme quietness of the street, darkness beginning to cluster under the plane trees. In the backyard I stood holding the hose on yellowing grass. Sky in the west a paling orange. Above, a colourless clarity.

  Moving house. One carload at a time. My room looks on to thousands of leaves. I lie on my bed and rest, looking up into the foliage. The dog lies in the hall and gazes out the front door. Back at the old house M’s three friends are moving in. Their different types of bed. Nobody there looks at me. I have ceased to exist.

  I feel, and have to force myself to write, that for the first time in my life I am able to stand up to, or with, a man of my own age whose strength of purpose and self-discipline are at least as great as mine. I’m prepared to behave with respect and patience.

  Our father twists his head, red-faced, shouts, ‘What I want to know is—what are you going to do with my money when I’m dead?’ They’ve been drinking. Mum puts her head back against the armchair and laughs out loud. ‘I think that’s really funny! We won’t know! ’Cause we’ll be dead!’

  At Manly V wouldn’t take off anything but his sandals. He says that men don’t like being looked at when they’re naked.

  Boy, can he write! Can he sling verbs around!

  Paralysis, since I no longer live with M. Everyone I tell has a different analysis. ‘It’s a lack of structure! What you people all need,’ says J, the Christian, ‘is original sin. That gives you form and structure! You won’t be happy, but at least you’ll know there’s shape.’ ‘It’s the abyss,’ says R, the Jungian. ‘A brand-new abyss. I envy you. Don’t fill it up with old things.’

  Me: ‘This house is full of ants. But single ants. You look at a square foot of floor, and there’ll be one ant just walking along vaguely. I think they’re Argentinian ants.’

  My sister: (looking bored) ‘Long walk.’

  Wind blew in the night: I thought I heard doors being opened and shut. Rain poured down. The house was waterproof. In the morning I hired a one-tonne flatbed truck to move the rest of my stuff. The pipsqueak at Hertz demanded incredible details from me—he rang the publisher and asked her to describe me. I told the guy who runs the Paragon that my old friend P is going to share the house with me. ‘You women!’ he said, handing me my coffee. ‘You get together again, late in life! Have you noticed?’ I was silent with shock. Late in life?

  The black kitten that F palmed off on us is clawing up and down my leg. P accepted the offer of a cat eagerly, sight unseen, though when she did see it she was not quite sure about its colour. ‘You can’t go back on it now,’ I said. She consulted one of her spiritual advisers, and returned saying black would be fine.

  A letter that comes straight towards me with open arms.

  Dreamt an old auntie told me that a woman ‘always needs a good pair of stout brown lace-up walking boots’.

  Sorted books for hours. At first I was ruthless, and culled, but as fatigue took over, all my decisions acquired a tone of angst, until I had to stop. Found an old literary magazine containing an interview with V. His sentences were so dry as to be starchy, perfectly constructed in a way that made me feel exhausted and slightly panicky. He is married. He is an intellectual. He is only messing with me. And I have dropped my guard. Reading at random in Canetti: ‘It seems that one cannot be severe all of a lifetime. It seems that something takes vengeance in one, and one becomes like everyone else.’ Is this the sort of stuff V would write? Painful speculations, sometimes grinding, always trying to tackle the worst, the least attractive, what cannot be made beautiful?

  The cheeky waiter at Notturno is the brother of a wildly erratic and endearing Italian boy I used to teach.

  ‘Tell me, how’s your brother?’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Up there.’ Points north. ‘Carlton cemetery.’

  ‘You’re pulling my leg.’

  ‘No. That’s where he is.’

  Pause.

  ‘Are you having me on?’

  ‘No.’ He is calm, but his smart expression is gone. The freckles round his eyes are standing out. ‘No. He died.’ Looks at his watch. ‘On the eighth.’

  ‘Why did he die?’

  ‘Heart attack.’

  ‘Heart attack? How old was he?’

  ‘Twenty-nine.’

  ‘Did he have something wrong with his heart?’

  ‘No. He had weak lungs. He smoked too much. He loved a bong. His wife came home and found him on the floor. They took him down to St Vincent’s and the doctor said he’d be all right. But he said to my mother, “Take me jewellery off, Mum—I’m gonna die.” And he died.’

  At least I am not bound to anyone, hurting him with my obsession. Examination of fantasy state: it is not a series of clear pictures. Really it is more a stupefaction, a state of suspension.

  Lunch in Fitzroy. The way friends, men and women, sit around a table, eating, drinking, telling little stories, making each other laugh. I dislike, and am shocked by, the spiteful sallies of one of the older men. I’d forgotten it. I’m used to living with teenagers. They have no bitterness.

  My sister calls, the counsellor. ‘How is it, living without M?’

  ‘Awful. I’m paralysed.’

  ‘Classic,’ she says. ‘Classic symptoms.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Grief. Starts with blankness, then that clears and it hurts more. It gets worse.’

  ‘And guilt?’

  ‘Yep. Huge discharge of guilt. Also—idealisation.’

  ‘Have you heard her HSC results?’

  We almost laugh.

  ‘Crying helps,’ she says, ‘if you can do it.’

  ‘But what should I do? My friend R says, “Go into it. Don’t be busy. Use it.”’

  ‘She’s right. The sacrament of whatever’s necessary.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Me.’

  Agitated, stunned, in distress, all at once. Sobs won’t form. I trudge about the house, hating the colours, ring up and order a deadlock, wait like a rabbit for Cinema Papers to call about my review. The cat has decided on a corner of my workroom as its lavatory.

  Her first day at primary school, her eagerness, the way she gazed up at the teacher, my jealousy of the teacher. The heavy surf of guilt: times when she wanted my company, my attention, and I gave it but not with a full heart, or gave it briefly and soon let my mind wander in boredom with her childishness. I ran away from her. Once when he and I squabbled in the car she punched herself methodically in the head, she punched herself for some time before I noticed. I’m ashamed of feeling these things, it’s an affliction I have to keep secret from her. Dull sky, cool wind, the side gate keeps banging. Voices in the street speaking another language. This state is like a second labour. I’m struggling to let her be born.

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

  H: ‘I’m old-fashioned too.’

  V: ‘Oh you are not.’

  H: ‘You’d be surprised.’

  V: ‘Name one respect in which you’re old-fashioned.’

  H: ‘I believe that children should be strictly brought up.’

  V: ‘Good. What else?’

  H: ‘Uhmmm…tablecloths. I like them, and I don
’t mind ironing them.’

  My first cheerful day since I ‘left home’. F called me and we went out to dinner. We spoke mainly French. I can still understand almost everything and can chatter away, but I get words wrong and sometimes a blankness occurs. We had fun, drank a bit of wine and made ourselves laugh. On the way home we stopped at our old house—now M’s and her friends’—to pick up my TV, a few pot plants and a ladder. The kitchen was full of the girls plus the law student and a debauched-looking, dense-faced boy I didn’t know. They told me M was ‘feeling ill’ and had gone to bed. They were all stoned, staggering with it, especially the law student, whose face was puffy. He stumbled about in a red baseball jacket, hopelessly bombed, his eyes like eggs. He looked like a pampered, adolescent, middle-class boy and I hated it. He barely greeted me. We collected what we’d come for. A lot of jolly noise, loud wisecracks in US accents—they were waiting for us to be gone so they could stagger out to the Prince of Wales. The law student asked me if I was coming to M’s party on Saturday night. ‘No. I’m going to the country. Anyway she hasn’t invited me.’ ‘She hasn’t invited you?’ ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ I say, without looking at him or meaning it, already halfway out the door, full of sadness, shame, anger, a burst of disagreeable feelings that still ache with a light persistence. When I got home I looked at myself in the mirror. My top lip had twisted, higher on the left than the right. I looked bitter. Older and wiser. I suppose when your mother is ‘old and wise’ you have to be very tough to break away. You must have to show no mercy.