Make no doubt about the pull of habit: the anxiety that ensues if any regular, familiar, pattern of event is disrupted, let alone stilled, however disagreeable the pattern of events might be. The first few mornings in Hugo’s company – usually a flurry of sexual activity, followed by a pleasant languor – prevented me from feeling any sense of early morning loss. As the flurries became a little more familiar, a little less accompanied by the shock of the new, indeed in general rather less, thoughts of home began to obtrude. I missed, of all things, breakfast. I missed Lou’s petulance, Sophie’s agitated search for missing garments, Ben’s repeated refusal to feed the cat with canned meat but only with tinned salmon: his apparent motive laudable – if he was a vegetarian, of the kind who eats fish, so should the cat be – his real motive to irritate his father, who was daily irritated.
I missed the hassle, the subdued indignation of a woman who, her husband insisting on a ‘sit-down breakfast for the family’ and not one taken merely on the wing, on the grounds that a family that eats together stays together, has on that account to spend twenty minutes every morning getting up and down from her chair, fetching fresh coffee, making more toast, answering the phone, removing the cat from the table, irritating that same husband every time she does so, because he likes peace while he eats. Must have peace, he, the creative artist, having barely recovered from last night’s concert, already tense about the next. Why of all times of day should I miss this particular dreadful hour? Had there been some real achievement here, after all, in the ritual sopping up of breakfast aggro in the interests of happy family life? Which seems so often, in spite of all theory and effort, to be the maternal and not the paternal role? When I had finished Lover at the Gate I could perhaps persuade the editor of Aura to run a piece on the problem; I didn’t want to write it myself – I just wanted to know; to be told, for once, what everything was all about, not to be the one who did the telling.
The pages of Lover at the Gate mounted steadily beside my printer. As the pile grew higher, so it seemed to me, little flickers of interest in the outside world returned. I both longed to finish it, yet dreaded the finishing. What then? When Eleanor had let me go, if Eleanor let me go, what then?