8 February 1973

It seems so reasonable now; the way I told it, the way I explained Dai Davies’ leaving to John in that letter, made it seem so reasonable. I’ve always tried to be even-handed whenever John’s asked about his father. Tried to be fair. I promised myself that I would never encourage John to hate his father, that I would always try to be fair about him. But really, when you think about it, what was there to be fair about?

Looking back — and how many times have I done that? — I didn’t know anything. I’d studied ethics, I’d torn the words ‘ought’, ‘right’, ‘good’ and ‘duty’ to pieces and put them back together again. So I thought I knew about people. And maybe I did? Because Dai Davies must have known that he ought to stay with me and John; known that it was his duty to stay, whether he wanted to or not. He must have known that. Everyone else did. Including, no doubt, the woman who left her hairgrip in my bed. I would even conjecture that she thought of the s even-months -pregnant wife as she lay there.

Instead, he chose to slink away while I was in hospital. Did he think I wouldn’t notice? That I’d get home and look around thinking, ‘Hmm, now what was I looking for? I know I put it somewhere …?’ Or did he imagine that I’d think, ‘Well, OK, all’s fair in love and war. May the best woman win’? I mean, what did he think? It was 1958, I was twenty-four, I didn’t have a job and I didn’t have a husband. People assumed I was a whore, a single parent, a fool, when I was none of those things. Well, maybe a fool.

What really gets me — ah, there are so many things. His face when I turned up in Bristol, when John was six months old, dressed to kill and feeling like it. I asked him, standing in the middle of Park Street, people brushing against me, between us, around us, scurrying to their lunch, I asked him with tears streaming down my face as his colleagues looked away, to come home, to come back to me and his son. He closed his eyes and sighed, looked down at the pavement, at the sky, at a passing bus, anywhere but at me and said — very quietly — ‘No.’ As he walked away, up the hill towards the Wills Building (where I had stood only a few years before, smiling, at my graduation) I grabbed his arm and he stopped, turned round and gently moved my hand away. ‘No,’ he said again. I walked to Temple Meads and caught a train. His face when he saw me standing outside the building on Park Street

— he was amazed. As if I were a ghost, a being who belonged to a different world, as I suppose I was. But he’d obviously thought that I would leave him alone. That I’d never trouble him again. He’d managed to erase me.