The Collector (19 page)

And he was gone, we didn’t even answer, and Caroline was looking after him, and shrugging and looking at me and saying, well, really.

I watched him go out, his hands in his pockets. I was red. Caroline was furious, trying to slide out of it. (“He’s always like that, he does it deliberately.”) Sneering at his painting all the way home (“second-rate Paul Nash”—ridiculously unfair). And me feeling so angry with her, and sorry for her at the same time. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t be sorry for her, but I couldn’t tell her he was right.

Between them Caroline and M have every quality I hate in other women. I had a sort of despair for days afterwards, thinking how much of their rotten, pretentious blood I must have in me. Of course, there are times when I like Caroline. Her briskness. Her enthusiasm. Her kindness. And even all the pretentiousness that’s so horrid next to the real thing—well, it’s better than nothing. I used to think the world of her when she came to stay. I used to love staying with her. She backed me up when there was the great family war about my future. All that till I lived with her and saw through her. Grew up. (I’m being a Hard Young Woman.)

Then a week later I ran into the lift at the Tube and he was the only other person there. I said hallo, too brightly. Went red again. He just nodded as if he didn’t want to speak, and then at the bottom (it was vanity, I couldn’t bear to be lumped with Caroline) I said, I’m sorry my aunt said that at Kenwood.

He said, she always irritates me. I knew he didn’t want to talk about it. As we went towards the platform, I said, she’s frightened of seeming behind the times.

Aren’t you?—and he gave me one of his dry little smiles. I thought, he doesn’t like me playing at “us” against “her.”

We were passing a film poster and he said, that’s a good film. Have you seen it? Do.

When we came out on the platform, he said, come round one day. But leave your bloody aunt at home. And he smiled. A little infectious mischievous smile. Not his age, at all. Then he walked off. So by-himself. So indifferent.

So I did go round. One Saturday morning. He was surprised. I had to sit in silence for twenty minutes with him and the weird Indian music. He got straight back on to the divan and lay with his eyes shut, as if I shouldn’t have come and I felt I ought never to have come (especially without telling C), and I felt as well that it really was a bit much, a pose. I couldn’t relax. At the end he asked me about myself, curtly, as if it was all rather a bore. And I stupidly tried to impress him. Do the one thing I shouldn’t. Show off. I kept on thinking, he didn’t really mean me to come round.

Suddenly he cut me short and took me round the room and made me look at things.

His studio. The most beautiful room. I always feel happy there. Everything in harmony. Everything expressing only him (it’s not deliberate, he hates “interior decoration” and gimmicks and Vogue). But it’s all him. Toinette, with her silly female
House and Garden
ideas of austere good taste, calling it “cluttered.” I could have bitten her head off. The feeling that someone lives all his life in it, works in it, thinks in it, is it.

And we thawed out. I stopped trying to be clever.

He showed me how he gets his “haze” effect. Tonksing gouache. With all his little home-made tools.

Some friends of his came in, Barber and Frances Cruikshank. He said, this is Miranda Grey I can’t stand her aunt, all in one breath, and they laughed, they were old friends. I wanted to leave. But they were going for a walk, they had come in to make him go with them, and they wanted me to go too. Barber Cruikshank did; he had special seduction eyes for me.

Supposing aunt sees us, G.P. said. Barber’s got the foulest reputation in Cornwall.

I said, she’s my aunt. Not my duenna.

So we all went to the Vale of Health pub and then on to Kenwood. Frances told me about their life in Cornwall and I felt for the first time in my life that I was among people of an older generation that I understood, real people. And at the same time I couldn’t help seeing Barber was a bit of a sham. All those funny malicious stories. While G.P. was the one who led us into all the serious things. I don’t mean that he wasn’t gay, too. Only he has this strange twist of plunging straight into what matters. Once when he was away getting drinks, Barber asked me how long I’d known G.P. Then he said, I wish to God I’d met someone like G.P. when I was a student. And quiet little Frances said, we think he’s the most wonderful person. He’s one of the few. She didn’t say which few, but I knew what she meant.

At Kenwood G.P. made us split. He took me straight to the Rembrandt and talked about it, without lowering his voice, and I had the smallness to be embarrassed because some other people there stared at us. I thought, we must look like father and daughter. He told me all about the background to the picture, what Rembrandt probably felt like at that time, what he was trying to say, how he said it. As if I knew nothing about art. As if he was trying to get rid of a whole cloud of false ideas I probably had about it.

We went out to wait for the others. He said, that picture moves me very much. And he looked at me, as if he thought I might laugh. One of those flashes of shyness he has.

I said, it moves me now, too.

But he grinned. It can’t possibly. Not for years yet.

How do you know?

He said, I suppose there are people who are purely moved by great art. I never met a painter who was. I’m not. All I think of when I see that picture is that it has the supreme mastery I have spent all my life trying to attain. And shall not. Ever. You’re young. You can understand. But you can’t feel that yet.

I said, I think I do.

He said, then that’s bad. You should be blind to failure. At your age. Then he said, don’t try to be our age. I shall despise you if you do.

He said, you’re like a kid trying to see over a six-foot wall.

That was the first time. He hated me for attracting him. The Professor Higgins side of him.

Later, when the Cruikshanks came out, he said, as they walked towards us, Barber’s a womanizer. Refuse to meet him if he asks.

I gave him a surprised look. He said, smiling at them, not you, I can’t stand the pain for Frances.

Back in Hampstead I left them and went on home. All the way back there I’d realized that G.P. was making sure Barber Cruikshank and I shouldn’t be left alone. They (Barber) asked me to come to see them if I was ever in Cornwall.

G.P. said, see you one day. As if he didn’t care whether he did or not.

I told Caroline I’d met him by chance. He had said he was sorry (lie). If she’d rather I didn’t see him, I wouldn’t. But I found him very stimulating to be with, full of ideas, I
needed
to meet such people. It was too bad of me, I knew she would do the decent thing if I put it like that. I was my own mistress—and so on.

And then she said, darling, you know I’m the last person to be a prude, but his reputation… there
must
be fire, there’s so much smoke.

I said, I’d heard about it. I could look after myself.

It’s her own fault. She shouldn’t insist on being called Caroline and treated like a girl in so many ways. I can’t respect her as an aunt. As a giver of advice.

Everything’s changing. I keep on thinking of him: of things he said and I said, and how we neither of us really understood what the other meant. No, he understood, I think. He counts possibilities so much faster than I can. I’m growing up so quickly down here. Like a mushroom. Or is it that I’ve lost my sense of balance? Perhaps it’s all a dream. I jab myself with the pencil. But perhaps that’s a dream, too.

If he came to the door now I should run into his arms. I should want him to hold my hand for weeks. I mean I believe I
could
love him in the other way, his way, now.

The curse is with me. I’m a bitch to
C.
No mercy. It’s the lack of privacy on top of everything else. I made him let me walk in the cellar this morning. I think I could hear a tractor working. And sparrows. So daylight, sparrows. An aeroplane. I was crying.

My emotions are all topsy-turvy, like frightened monkeys in a cage. I felt I was going mad last night, so I wrote and wrote and wrote myself into the other world. To escape in spirit, if not in fact. To prove it still exists.

I’ve been making sketches for a painting I shall do when I’m free. A view of a garden through a door. It sounds silly in words. But I see it as something very special, all black, umber, dark, dark grey, mysterious angular forms in shadow leading to the distant soft honey-whitish square of the light-filled door. A sort of horizontal shaft.

I sent him away after supper and I’ve been finishing
Emma
. I
am
Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong things, she tries to organize other people’s lives, she can’t see Mr. Knightley is a man in a million. She’s temporarily silly, yet all the time one knows she’s basically intelligent, alive. Creative, determined to set the highest standards. A real human being. Her faults are my faults: her virtues I must
make
my virtues.

And all day I’ve been thinking—I shall write some more about G.P. tonight.

There was the time I took some of my work round for him to look at. I took the things I thought
he
would like (not just the clever-clever things, like the perspective of Ladymont). He didn’t say a thing as he looked through them. Even when he was looking at the ones (like the
Carmen at Ivinghoe
) that I think are my best (or did then). And at the end he said, they’re not much good. In my opinion. But a bit better than I expected. It was as if he had turned and hit me with his fist, I couldn’t hide it. He went on, it’s quite useless if I think of your feelings in any way at all. I can see you’re a draughtsman, you’ve a fairish sense of colour and what-not, sensitive. All that. But you wouldn’t be at the Slade if you hadn’t.

I wanted him to stop but he would go on. You’ve obviously seen quite a lot of good painting. Tried not to plagiarize too flagrantly. But this thing of your sister—Kokoschka, a mile off. He must have seen my cheeks were red because he said, is all this rather disillusioning? It’s meant to be.

It nearly killed me. I know he was right; it
would
have been ridiculous if he hadn’t said exactly what he thought. If he’d just kind-uncled me. But it hurt. It hurt like a series of slaps across the face. I’d made up my mind that he would like some of my work. What made it worse was his coldness. He seemed so absolutely serious and clinical. Not the faintest line of humour or tenderness, even of sarcasm, on his face. Suddenly much, much older than me.

He said, one has to learn that painting well—in the academic and technical sense—comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you’ve got that ability. So have thousands. But the thing I look for isn’t here. It just isn’t here.

Then he said, I know this hurts. As a matter of fact, I nearly asked you not to bring this round. But then I thought… there’s a sort of eagerness about you. You’d survive.

You knew they wouldn’t be any good, I said.

I expected just about this. Shall we forget you brought them? But I knew he was challenging me.

I said, tell me in detail what is wrong with this. And I gave him one of the street scenes.

He said, it’s quite graphic, well composed, I can’t tell you details. But it’s not living art. It’s not a limb of your body. I don’t expect you to understand this at your age. It can’t be taught you. You either have it one day, or you don’t. They’re teaching you to express personality at the Slade—personality in general. But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it’s no go if your personality isn’t worth translating. It’s all luck. Pure hazard.

He spoke in fits and starts. And there was a silence. I said, shall I tear them up? and he said, now you’re being hysterical.

I said, I’ve got so much to learn.

He got up and said, I think you’ve got something in you. I don’t know. Women very rarely have. I mean most women just want to be good at something, they’ve got good-at minds, and they mean deftness and a flair and good taste and whatnot. They can’t ever understand that if your desire is to go to the furthest limits of yourself then the actual form your art takes doesn’t seem important to you. Whether you use words or paint or sounds. What you will.

I said, go on.

He said, it’s rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven’t any choice. But it’s what you say that counts. It’s what distinguishes all great art from the other kind. The technically accomplished buggers are two a penny in any period. Especially in this great age of universal education. He was sitting on his divan, talking at my back. I had to stare out of the window. I thought I was going to cry.

He said, critics spiel away about superb technical accomplishment. Absolutely meaningless, that sort of jargon. Art’s cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart. And all you’ve done here is build a lot of little windows on to a heart full of other fashionable artists’ paintings. He came and stood beside me and picked out one of the new abstracts I’d done at home. You’re saying something here about Nicholson or Pasmore. Not about yourself. You’re using a camera. Just as
trompe-l’oeil
is mischannelled photography, so is painting in someone else’s style. You’re photographing here. That’s all.

I’ll never learn, I said.

It’s to unlearn, he said. You’ve nearly finished the learning. The rest is luck. No, a little more than luck. Courage. Patience.

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened.

It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away. Shone on everything. Now I write down what he said, it seems so obvious. But it’s something in the way he says things. He is the
only
person I know who always seems to mean what he says when he talks about art. If one day you found he didn’t, it would be like a blasphemy.