The Collector (18 page)

1. If you are a real artist, you give your whole being to your art. Anything short of that, then you are not an artist. Not what G.P. calls a “maker.”

2. You don’t gush. You don’t have little set-pieces or set-ideas you gush out to impress people with.

3. You
have
to be Left politically because the Socialists are the only people who care, for all their mistakes. They
feel
, they want to better the world.

4. You must
make
, always. You
must
act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you’re going to paint. The most
terrible
bad form.

5. If you feel something deeply, you’re not ashamed to show your feeling.

6. You accept that you are English. You don’t pretend that you’d rather be French or Italian or something else. (Piers always talking about his American grandmother.)

7. But you don’t compromise with your background. You cut off all the old you that gets in the way of the maker you. If you’re suburban (as I realize D and M are—their laughing at suburbia is just a blind), you throw away (cauterize) the suburbs. If you’re working class, you cauterize the working class in you. And the same, whatever class you are, because class is primitive and silly.

(It’s not only me. Look at that time Louise’s boyfriend—the miner’s son from Wales—met him, and how they argued and snarled at each other, and we were all against G.P. for being so contemptuous about working-class people and working-class life. Calling them animals, not human beings. And David Evans, all white and stammering, don’t you tell me my father’s a bloody animal I’ve got to kick out of the way, and G.P. saying I’ve never hurt an animal in my life, you can always make out a case for hurting human beings, but human animals deserve every sympathy. And then David Evans coming up to me last month and actually
admitting
it had changed him, that evening.)

8. You hate the political business of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don’t have any time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don’t go to silly films, even if you want to; you don’t read cheap newspapers; you don’t listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don’t waste time talking about nothing. You
use
your life.

I must have always wanted to believe in those things; I did believe in them in a vague sort of way, before I met him. But he’s
made
me believe them; it’s the thought of
him
that makes me feel guilty when I break the rules.

If he’s made me believe them, that means he’s made a large part of the new me.

If I had a fairy godmother—please, make G.P. twenty years younger. And please, make him physically attractive to me.

How he would despise that!

It’s odd (and I feel a little guilty) but I have been feeling happier today than at any time since I came here. A feeling—all will turn out for the best. Partly because I did something this morning. I tried to escape. Then, Caliban has accepted it. I mean if he was going to attack me, he’d surely do it at some time when he had a reason to be angry. As he was this morning. He has tremendous self-control, in some ways.

I know I also feel happy because I’ve been not here for most of the day. I’ve been mainly thinking about G.P. In his world, not this one here. I remembered so much. I would have liked to write it all down. I gorged myself on memories. This world makes that world seem so real, so living, so beautiful. Even the sordid parts of it.

And partly, too, it’s been a sort of indulging in wicked vanity about myself. Remembering things G.P. has said to me, and other people. Knowing I am rather a special person. Knowing I am intelligent, knowing that I am beginning to understand life much better than most people of my age. Even knowing that I shall never be so stupid as to be vain about it, but be grateful, be terribly glad (especially after this) to be alive, to be who I am—Miranda, and unique.

I shall never let anyone see this. Even if it is the truth, it must
sound
vain.

Just as I never let other girls see that I know I am pretty; nobody knows how I’ve fallen over myself not to take that unfair advantage. Wandering male eyes, even the nicest, I’ve snubbed.

Minny: one day when I’d been gushing about her dress when she was going out to a dance. She said, shut up. You’re so pretty you don’t even have to try.

G.P. saying, you’ve every kind of face.

Wicked.

I’m making him cook better. Absolute ban on frozen food. I must have fruit, green vegetables. I have steak. Salmon. I ordered him to get caviare yesterday. It irritates me that I can’t think of enough rare foods I haven’t had and have wanted to have.

Pig.

Caviare is wonderful.

I’ve had another bath. He daren’t refuse, I think he thinks “ladies” fall down dead if they don’t have a bath when they want one.

I’ve put a message down the place. In a little plastic bottle with a yard of red ribbon round it. I hope it will become unrolled and someone may see it. Somewhere. Sometime. They ought to find the house easily enough. He was silly to tell me about the date over the door. I had to end by saying THIS IS NOT A HOAX. Terribly difficult not to make it sound like a silly joke. And I said anyone ringing up D and telling him would get £25. I’m going to launch a bottle on the sea (hmm) every time I have a bath.

He’s taken down all the brass gewgaws on the landing and stairs. And the horrible viridian-orange-magenta paintings of Majorcan fishing-villages. The poor place sighs with relief.

I like being upstairs. It’s nearer freedom. Everything’s locked. All the windows in the front of the house have indoor shutters. The others are padlocked. (Two cars passed tonight, but it must be a very unimportant road.)

I’ve also started to educate him. Tonight in the lounge (my hands tied, of course) we went through a book of paintings. No mind of his own. I don’t think he listens half the time.

He’s thinking about sitting near me and straining to be near without touching. I don’t know if it’s sex, or fear that I’m up to some trick.

If he does think about the pictures, he accepts everything I say. If I said Michelangelo’s
David
was a frying-pan he’d say—“I see.”

Such people. I must have stood next to them in the Tube, passed them in the street, of course I’ve overheard them and I knew they existed. But never really believed they exist. So totally blind. It never seemed possible.

Dialogue. He was sitting still looking at the book with an Art-Is-Wonderful air about him (for my benefit, not because he believes it, of course).

M.
Do you know what’s really odd about this house? There aren’t any books. Except what you’ve bought for me.

C.
Some upstairs.

M.
About butterflies.

C.
Others.

M.
A few measly detective novels. Don’t you ever read proper books—real books?
(Silence.)
Books about important things by people who really feel about life. Not just paperbacks to kill time on a train journey. You know, books?

C.
Light novels are more my line.
(He’s like one of those boxers. You wish he’d lie down and be knocked out.)

M.
You can jolly well read
The Catcher in the Rye
. I’ve almost finished it. Do you know I’ve read it twice and I’m five years younger than you are?

C.
I’ll read it.

M.
It’s not a punishment.

C.
I looked at it before I brought it down.

M.
And you didn’t like it.

C.
I’ll try it.

M.
You make me sick.

Silence then. I felt unreal, as if it
was
a play and I couldn’t remember who I was in it.

And I asked him earlier today why he collected butterflies.

C.
You get a nicer class of people.

M.
You can’t collect them just because of that.

C.
It was a teacher I had. When I was a kid. He showed me how. He collected. Didn’t know much. Still set the old way.
(Something to do with the angle of the wings. The modern way is to have them at right angles.)
And my uncle. He was interested in nature. He always helped.

M.
He sounds nice.

C.
People interested in nature always are nice. You take what we call the Bug Section. That’s the Entomological Section of the Natural History Society back home. They treat you for what you are. Don’t look down their noses at you. None of that.

M.
They’re not always nice.
(But he didn’t get it.)

C.
You get the snob ones. But they’re mostly like I say. A nicer class of people than what you… what I meet… met in the ordinary way.

M.
Didn’t your friends despise you? Didn’t they think it was sissy?

C.
I didn’t have any friends. They were just people I worked with. (After a bit he said, they had their silly jokes.)

M.
Such as?

C.
Just silly jokes.

I didn’t go on. I have an irresistible desire sometimes to get to the bottom of him, to drag things he won’t talk about out of him. But it’s bad. It sounds as if I care about him and his miserable, wet, unwithit life.

When you use words. The gaps. The way Caliban sits, a certain bowed-and-upright posture—why? Embarrassment? To spring at me if I run for it? I can draw it. I can draw his face and his expressions, but words are all so used, they’ve been used about so many other things and people. I write “he smiled.” What does that mean? No more than a kindergarten poster painting of a turnip with a moon-mouth smile. Yet if I draw the smile…

Words are so crude, so terribly primitive compared to drawing, painting, sculpture. “I sat on my bed and he sat by the door and we talked and I tried to persuade him to use his money to educate himself and he said he would but I didn’t feel convinced.” Like a messy daub.

Like trying to draw with a broken lead.

All this is my own thinking.

I need to see G.P. He’d tell me the names of ten books where it’s all said much better.

How I hate ignorance! Caliban’s ignorance, my ignorance, the world’s ignorance! Oh, I could learn and learn and learn and learn. I could cry, I want to learn so much.

Gagged and bound.

I’ll put this to bed where it lives under the mattress. Then I’ll pray to God for learning.

A fortnight today. I have marked the days on the side of the screen, like Robinson Crusoe.

I feel depressed. Sleepless. I must, must, must escape.

I’m getting so pale. I feel ill, weak, all the time.

This terrible silence.

He’s so without mercy. So incomprehensible. What does he want? What is to happen?

He must see I’m getting ill.

I told him this evening that I must have some daylight. I made him look at me and see how pale I am.

Tomorrow, tomorrow. He never says no outright.

Today I’ve been thinking he could keep me here forever. It wouldn’t be very long, because I’d die. It’s absurd, it’s diabolical—but there is no way of escape. I’ve been trying to find loose stones again. I could dig a tunnel round the door. I could dig a tunnel right out. But it would have to be at least twenty feet long. All the earth. Being trapped inside it. I could never do it. I’d rather die. So it must be a tunnel round the door. But to do that I must have time. I must be sure he is away for at least six hours. Three for the tunnel, two to break through the outer door. I feel it is my best chance, I mustn’t waste it, spoil it through lack of preparation.

I can’t sleep.

I must do something.

I’m going to write about the first time I met G.P.

Caroline said, oh, this is Miranda. My niece. And went on telling him odiously about me (one Saturday morning shopping in the Village) and I didn’t know where to look, al-though I’d been wanting to meet him. She’d talked about him before.

At once I liked the way he treated her, coolly, not trying to hide he was bored. Not giving way before her, like everyone else. She talked about him all the way home. I knew she was shocked by him, although she wouldn’t admit it. The two broken marriages and then the obvious fact that he didn’t think much of her. So that I wanted to defend him from the beginning.

Then meeting him walking on the Heath. Having wanted to meet him again, and being ashamed again.

The way he walked. Very self-contained, not loosely. Such a nice old pilot-coat. He said hardly anything, I knew he really didn’t want to be with us (with Caroline) but he’d caught us up; he can’t have spotted from behind who we were, he was obviously going the same way. And perhaps (I’m being vain) it was something that happened when Caroline was going on in her silly woman-of-advanced-ideas way—just a look between us. I knew he was irritated and he knew I was ashamed. So he went round Kenwood with us and Caroline showed off.

Until she said in front of the Rembrandt, don’t you think he got the teeniest bit bored halfway through—I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel. You know? And she gave him her stupid listen-to-me laugh.

I was looking at him and his face suddenly went minutely stiff, as if he’d been caught off guard. It wasn’t done for me to see, it was the minutest change in the set of his mouth. He just gave her one look. Almost amused. But his voice wasn’t. It was icy cold.

I must go now. Goodbye. The goodbye was for me. It wrote me off. Or it said—so you can put up with this? I mean (looking back on it) he seemed to be teaching
me
a lesson. I had to choose. Caroline’s way, or his.