Another thought: perhaps I did?

14 January 2000

John called via Type-Talk this evening. He sounded sleepy. He had the myringoplasty the day before yesterday. No problems, everything went well. Apparently he spent yesterday waiting for the bandage to be removed, and when it was, both ears were revealed intact. He has to rest now for two weeks and then he goes in to have the gauze removed. I wish I was with him. I know how to look after him — after all, I’ve had enough practice. But I can’t leave Ellen.

The first step is over and I can’t wait for him to be able to hear, no matter how much, how little, to hear something. I told Ellen when she woke up and she nodded and smiled, which is all she’s capable of. The timing of all this is shit. I wish I could have a drink.

18 January 2000

It’s a beautiful morning, a late, pink-golden dawn over the valley. I can’t remember if I’ve ever written an entry this early before. I haven’t slept because Ellen and I talked all night; well, that is, Ellen talked. She woke yesterday evening and began to ramble, so quietly I could hardly hear her, her hands stroking the blankets. Occasionally she’d stop and doze for a few minutes, then wake to begin again. I realised that she was hallucinating, wandering, sliding over the ice rink of her life from present to past to future. I threw logs on the fire as the night went on and simply let her speak.

‘I knew,’ she said, in a feathery voice, so light I had to lean near to hear it, ‘that Matt was dead, that he’d fallen out of a boat because I was there with him, not there with him, but in my head I knew. And that night when he and I went out in Cambridge and there were protests all over about bussing and during the Bay of Pigs we hardly dared move, hardly dared breathe. My mother asked me when I was going to marry again and I told her never because I loved Matt and so that was it. The nursery was at the back of the house. It was pale yellow with orange curtains. Sometimes wonder what would have happened if it had been different colours, but what’s the point? We had sex before we married and I lay there afterwards thinking a bolt of lightning would smash right through the ceiling but it didn’t and I’m glad because we stayed together. I went to Paris with a friend and we went to the Grand Canyon — that’s in America — and had ice-cream in a truck-stop someplace. My husband and I live in America, which is a good place to live apart from Kennedy was shot yesterday. He was sitting in his car and there was Jackie covered in blood and we couldn’t do anything. Then we shot Martin Luther King, which wasn’t right but it’s OK now.’