There’s a distinct rhythm to the years — panic and uncertainty when John and I first left the hospital. Looking back, reading those entries, I realise I was unhinged and I think I would have stayed that way if it hadn’t been for Ellen. I was so attentive, so attuned to John’s moods, so vigilant, that I wasn’t a good mother: I was a dangerous one. I spent his adolescence quivering with guilt and fear — poor bugger, when I look back. I spent my life worrying about first his friendless state and then his childlessness. Perhaps if I’d guessed both would be the case I would have quivered a little less and lived a little more? The journals for those years, when he was at school and university, are many, dog-eared, stained by rings of ice melting in whisky glasses, the paper fibres of each page fattened by moisture they soaked up. Each night I’d sit and doggedly write beyond the point of sensibility. Many entries are unreadable, indecipherable and, so, locked in time. I wonder if that is how the practice of conversation is for John. Or, if not conversation, his memories of sound.

Once he married Sonja the tone of the journals changed, the quivering, it seems, died down. The years acquired a rhythm matched by the seasons. Each year Ellen and I travelled, once she’d had her annual check-up, and if it was OK we would go somewhere from April to July. Winters spent driving back and forth to the Cots wolds, and Ellen spending some of the summer here. As I flipped through the journals today I was reminded of so many things, so many times I’d forgotten. Holidays in Scotland with Ellen; weekends spent awkwardly with John and Sonja in Bristol; leaving teaching; taking my first trip into Plymouth. But the later journals are slimmer, the writing more legible, the water rings fewer.

That is the other calibration of my life — how far down the whisky bottle I sink each night. This I wonder about. I fill these notebooks and pack them away so that John can read them one day, if he wants to, and I have the feeling he will want to. And when he does, the writing and the water rings will reveal my life for what it is: the life of a drunk. Will he forgive me?

9 October 1979

The first night I went out with Miles, I slept with him. I’d never done that before — gone out with a man and slept with him within hours. Miles took me to Topsham, to the Bridge Inn, a barn of a pub full of small dark cubby-holes with fires roaring. We huddled over a small round table, which wobbled beneath our elbows, and talked of work and literature, colleagues and their inadequacies. He taught politics and sociology, subjects I knew little about. I became increasingly inarticulate as he stared at me, crept closer. The skin of my face grew warm and I found it difficult to concentrate on what he said, I was so busy looking at his beautiful face. He had the ridiculous sideburns of the time and blond hair which flopped over the collar of his shirt.