When we woke up it was morning and we were both nauseated, and your swollen lip was more grotesque than ever, and your black eye was now green. You got up, staggered to the wash-stand and washed your face. I heard you groan. I watched you dress. I felt your kiss on my forehead as you said goodbye, and that nauseated me too. Then you climbed out the window and I heard you stagger up the hillside, the grass swishing and the little twigs breaking under your uncertain feet.

I am trying to remember it chronologically. Winter or spring or summer, they were days without change. Good for the night, thanks for the darkness, otherwise we would not have known that one day ended and another began. I had 240 pages done and the end was in sight. The rest was a cruise on smooth water. Then off to Hackmuth it would go, tra la, and the agony would begin.

It was about that time that we went to Terminal Island, Camilla and I. A manmade island, that place, a long finger of earth pointing at Catalina. Earth and canneries and the smell of fish, brown houses full of Japanese children, stretches of white sand with wide black pavements running up and down, and the Japanese kids playing football in the streets. She was irritable, she had been drinking too much, and her eyes had that stark old woman’s look of a chicken. We parked the car in the broad street and walked a hundred yards to the beach. There were rocks at the water’s edge, jagged stones swarming with crabs. The crabs were having a tough time of it, because the sea gulls were after them, and the sea gulls screeched and clawed and fought among themselves. We sat on the sand and watched them, and Camilla said they were so beautiful, those gulls.

‘I hate them,’ I said.

‘You!’ she said. ‘You hate everything.’

‘Look at them,’ I said. ‘Why do they pick on those poor crabs? The crabs ain’t doing anything. Then why in the hell do they mob them like that?’

‘Crabs,’ she said. ‘Ugh.’

‘I hate a sea gull,’ I said. ‘They’ll eat anything, the deader the better.’

‘For God’s sake shut up for a change. You always spoil everything. What do I care what they eat?’

In the street the little Japanese kids were having a big football game. They were all youngsters under twelve. One of them was a pretty good passer. I turned my back on the sea and watched the game. The good passer had flung another into the arms of one of his teammates. I got interested and sat up.

‘Watch the sea,’ Camilla said. ‘You’re supposed to admire beautiful things, you writer.’

‘He throws a beautiful pass,’ I said.

The swelling had gone from her lips, but her eye was still discoloured.

‘I used to come here all the time,’ she said. ‘Almost every night.’

‘With that other writer,’ I said. ‘That really great writer, that Sammy the genius.’