5 January 2000

John left me the letter from the second Mrs Davies - he said it was mine because it was addressed to me. I think you should be the one to tell him since you will find the right words.’ What on earth makes her think that? And what would the right words he? It’s as if she knows them and assumes I do too, but I don’t. I can’t imagine how I would have told my son that his forever-absent father was dead. I ask myself again — was I a good mother? Always the answer is the same.

Dai Davies — the last time I saw him I was standing in Park Street, dressed to seduce, breasts heavy with milk. ‘No,’ he said, and my brain — that fine-tuned instrument which could cope with the uncertainties of metaphysics and aesthetics, ethics and semiotics — jammed. I might have been able to grapple with signs and signifiers, teleology and ontology, but the word ‘No’ undid me.

Do I mourn him? No, I don’t. I cried enough for him when he was alive. I have thought about him everything it is possible for me to think. Ultimately, I suppose, he became one of my many ‘what ifs’ What if he had stayed? Would I have been content? Or would I have fallen into bed with others as I ended up doing? Would I have driven up to London for John’s birthday? How different would our lives have been? What if I had ended up leaving him? Pointless. All these imaginings are pointless. I have nothing left to think about him for myself. I’ve always worried that John thought of him too often, that John’s waiting for his father to appear stopped him doing other things. Now I worry about John’s half-brothers — I don’t want them to appear, Dai Davies’ cubs, because John doesn’t need to see them.

Since John and Sonja left I haven’t had a drink and it doesn’t get any easier - it seems that my blood needs alcohol to move quickly, to make my mind wander. There’s not one watermark in this journal and it’s five days old.

8 January 2000

At Christmas John told me that he’d been into the attic at Thurlestone and he’d found my journals, read them all. I know that was what I wanted, that it was a conscious decision not to destroy them, so that he could find them if he wanted to. But, but… over the past week, as I’ve tramped through rain with the dogs and the clouds of toxins have dissipated, leaving my memory no hiding place, I’ve remembered things I wrote that I didn’t, really, wish him to know. There have been times when I’ve been walking through the woods and been suddenly paralysed by an image, by a page I wrote, in the same way that drunken behaviour reveals itself the next day in embarrassing, stuttering, time-lapse montages. Did I want John to know about Miles — that I slept with him at the cottage? That I lied to John? That I kept the truth about the hairgrip from him? Did I really want him to know that I often forgot at first that he couldn’t hear? That I didn’t tell him about his half-brothers — the biggest lie of all? And what, exactly, did he make of the picture of me crawling on bloodied knees on the path outside Ellen’s kitchen, sweeping up the evidence of a drunk’s binge? Attractive. I suppose he always knew I was a drunk, that the people of the village whispered behind their hands that I was a witch, a monster, a grotesque. I don’t think they think that now but neither do I imagine that they will ever consider me their erudite monster. But the thought that made me stop dead, half over a stile, a boot slipping on thick red mud, was that he now knows how vain, how shallow I was when he was young. That all I wanted was to be desired and I didn’t really care by whom. He will think that I deserved Dai Davies.