Greta Clement had another of her beastly headaches. Snakes climbing through her head - from head to stomach and back again - as though the whole of her were filled with serpents looking for a ladder to wrap themselves around — her strung-out nerves.

Anywhere would do.

Headaches move on; like bored lovers they soon take up residence elsewhere. Head for the stomach; tunnel downwards. Greta places her hand across her naval. There they are. Soon she will give birth to a brood of snakes.

How melodramatic!

Perhaps I should go and lie down although it is only mid morning and there is still so much of the day to get through. I cannot face it; I must find an exit, and Greta lifts her hand to her brow.

How different is Greta from her friend Dorothy? I’m their author, I should know. Do we all merge after a while, we genteel womenfolk with our headaches.

Greta is a more diminutive character. Less operatic. She wouldn’t lie around reading The Duchess of Malfi. No. Greta likes a good murder mystery and, recently, Middlemarch. She read it at college a long time ago, although college wasn’t so long ago. Greta is just more folded away, dutiful, more of a friend than most of us. Being a friend takes time. She is a friend to Leonard, her husband. Leonard needs a friend. He is an unaware person; he doesn’t understand that people need things because he needs very little: a study, some peace, the right sort of books, probably not a parish.

Greta is aware; she is a finely tuned piano. Dorothy is aware too but she minds less than Greta because she can. She has Henry and Henry is retired and Henry is a man — all that has already been shown — Henry leaves Dorothy alone. The difference is one of circumstance. Greta lives in a threadbare manse, Dorothy in a manor. At the manor the imagination can soar; there is a high wall, there are poplar trees, there is a man raking leaves from her pond.

(From POND LIFE: NOVEL FORMS OF LIVING, a work in progress)