He said to me today, ‘Why should I waste money on a psychiatrist when I get treatment from you, free?’ It was said savagely, with triumph. I said to him it was unfair to use me in this role. He said, with the same triumphant hate: ‘Englishwoman! Fair! Everyone makes use of each other. You make use of me to create a Hollywood dream of happiness, and in return I’m going to use your experience of the witch-doctors.’ A moment after we were making love. When we quarrel, we hate each other, then sex comes out of the hate. It’s a hard violent sex, like nothing I’ve known before, nothing (*16) to do with the creature who is the woman-in-love. She disowns it completely.

Today he criticized me in bed for a movement, and I realized he was comparing me with someone. I remarked that there were different schools in love-making, and we came from two different schools. We were hating each other, but all this was quite good-humoured. For he began thinking about it and then he roared with laughter. ‘Love,’ he said, sentimental as a schoolboy, ‘is international.’ ‘Screwing,’ I said, ‘is a matter of national styles. No Englishman would make love like you. I am referring of course to the ones that do make love.’ He began making up a pop-song — ‘I’ll like your national style if you’ll like mine.’

The walls of this flat close in on us. Day after day we’re alone here. I’m conscious that we are both mad. He says, with a yell of laughter: ‘Yeah, I’m crazy, it’s taken me all my short life to recognize it, and now what? Suppose I prefer being crazy, what then?’

Meanwhile my anxiety is permanent, I’ve forgotten what it is like to wake up normally; yet I watch this state I’m in, and even think: Well, I’ll never suffer from my own anxiety state, so I might just as well experience someone else’s while I get the chance.

Sometimes I try to play ‘the game’. Sometimes I write in this and the yellow notebook. Or I watch the light change on the floor, so that a grain of dirt, or a knot in the wood magnify and symbolize themselves. Upstairs Saul walks up and down, up and down, or there are long periods of silence. Both silence and the sound of feet reverberate along my nerves. When he leaves the flat ‘to go for a little walk’ my nerves seem to stretch out and follow him, as if tied to him.

Today he came in and I knew by instinct he had been sleeping with someone. I challenged him, not out of being hurt, but because we are two antagonists, and he said: ‘No, what makes you think that?’ Then his face became greedy, cunning, furtive, and he said: ‘I’ll produce an alibi if you like.’ I laughed, although I was angry, and the fact that I laughed restored me. I am mad, obsessed with a cold jealousy which I have never experienced before, I am the sort of woman who reads private letters and diaries; yet when I laugh, I am cured. He didn’t like my laughing, for he said: ‘Prisoners learn to talk a certain language.’ And I said: ‘If I’ve never been a jailor before, and if I’ve now become one, perhaps it is because you need one.’