I have been trying to write this entry for days. Morgan, like the witch you are named for, you have the gift of working transformations. Thank you for being so outraged. Thank you for being so understanding. Thank you for being so very on my side.
âBut you could come back to Switzerland,â Krista is saying. It is Sunday morning, the day already muggy outside, and we are messing about idly before breakfast. Krista is one of my closest European friends; I am godmother to her third son. I could bat the question away, of course, but sheâs genuinely interested; she really wants to know what Iâm planning and where Iâm going. Sheâs a friend: she doesnât deserve a lie by omission.
So I tell her: Iâm about (or very nearly about) to start an IVF cycle.
The change in her is instant. At once, I see that a face as black as thunder is not just a simile: somehow she actually darkens; her body, sprawled contentedly on the floor, draws in and condenses, and she rises to her knees. And then it starts, and I feel it like thunder, like the kind of hail that will smack on the roof and bounce.
âYouâre not well enough.â
âBut youâve seen me ââ
âIâve seen you for a few days,â she says. Somewhere, we have lost the logic. âA child is forever.â
âYou have no idea of the exhaustion. You have no idea.â
âMy sister has two kids,â I say;â Iâve watched her; Iâve seen what sheâs gone through â
âNo, you havenât seen it,â she says. âYou havenât seen it, or you'd know you couldnât do it.â (I know, a priori, that you couldnât manage, so it follows that whatever youâve seen, whatever conclusions youâve reached, are irrelevant.)
I have argued with Krista plenty of times, have had her cross with me more than once, but I have never experienced this, not this judgment and fury, with its unrelenting, lashing quality
 âThere are also the interests of the child to consider,â Ole says, in his measured way; in sync, Krista flings at me, âHavenât you thought about the child? Iâm telling you this because I am your friend. Donât you know how it damages a child when its mother canât cope? (How irresponsible you are to be thinking of giving a child a mother like you.)
âAnd what about passing the illness on to the child?â
This provokes me. âLook, I wouldnât have wanted to be aborted,â I say sharply, because this stings. (Isnât it better not to be than to be like you?)
Suddenly, she is hurling everything at me. âForget about finding intellectual stimulation,â she says. âYouâll have to go back to the provinces; youâll have to ââ (I am very sure about how you will have to live your life.)
âIf you do try it, you can - I canât do much from Europe, but you can ring me up,â she says widerwillig, against her will. This whole time, we have been speaking German, but now she breaks into English: âMachâs, wenn duâs musst, but ââ and now her voice is heavy, and her accent strong ââ without my blessing.â
We could be re-enacting a story from the Brothers Grimm: I have stumbled across the tripwire to a spell, and nothing any of the three of us does manages to sweep the cobwebs off the day.
Later, when the two of them meet a friend for lunch, I say I will walk from Matakana Winery, where they are beginning a sculpture trail, to Snells Beach. It is over eight kilometres, a two-hour, undulating walk in the noonday sun; when I arrive at last, and collapse into a cafe for lunch and wine, I am completely zonked. Later, they and their friend pick me up, and we head back to the winery. Daunted by the small talk that I know will follow if I go in with them, and sleepy from the wine and the hike over the headlands, I say that I will wait in the car, and doze.
Instantly, Krista whips round. âAnd how are you going to manage that with a child?â she asks acidly.
âI wonât go for a two-hour walk in the blazing sun,â I say.
 But the fabric between us is well and truly torn. The easy joking that has always characterised us, the shuttle of wordplay and laughter and the weft of deep conversation, of what we really think, is gone. In its place is silence, and a kind of closed hostility.
