The Collector (22 page)

Just the two cups and the little copper vriki and his hand. Or a hand. Lying by one of the cups, like a plaster cast. On the back he wrote,
Après
, and the date. And then,
pour “une” princesse lointaine
. The “
une
” was very heavily underlined.

I wanted to go on about Toinette. But I’m too tired. I want to smoke when I write, and it makes the air so stuffy.

(Morning.) He’s gone into? Lewes.

Toinette.

It was a month after the evening of the record. I ought to have guessed, she had been purring over me for days, giving me arch looks. I thought it was something to do with Piers. And then one evening I rang the bell and then I noticed the lock was up, so I pushed the door open and looked up the stairs, at the same time as Toinette looked down round the door. And we were looking at each other. After a moment she came out on the landing and she was dressing. She didn’t say anything, she just gestured me to come up and into the studio and what was worst, I was red, and she was not. She was just amused.

Don’t look so shocked, she said. He’ll be back in a minute. He’s just gone out for… but I never heard what it was, because I went.

I’ve never really analyzed why I was so angry and so shocked and so hurt. Donald, Piers, David, everyone knows she lives in London as she lived in Stockholm—she’s told me herself, they’ve told me. And G.P. had told me what he was like.

It was not just jealousy. It was that someone like G.P. could be so close to someone like her—someone so real and someone so shallow, so phoney, so loose. But why should he have considered me at all? There’s not a single reason.

He’s twenty-one years older than I am. Nine years younger than D.

For days afterwards it wasn’t G.P. I was disgusted with, but myself. At my narrow-mindedness. I forced myself to meet, to listen to Toinette. She didn’t crow at all. I think that must have been G.P.’s doing. He ordered her not to.

She went back the next day. She said it was to say she was sorry. And (her words), “It just happened.”

I was so jealous. They made me feel older than they were. They were like naughty children. Happy-with-a-secret. Then that I was frigid. I couldn’t bear to see G.P. In the end, it must have been a week later, he rang me up again one evening at Caroline’s. He didn’t sound guilty. I said I was too busy to see him. I wouldn’t go round that evening, no. If he had pressed, I would have refused. But he seemed to be about to ring off, and I said I’d go round the next day. I so wanted him to know I was hurt. You can’t be hurt over a telephone.

Caroline said, I think you’re seeing too much of him.

I said, he’s having an
affaire
with that Swedish girl.

We even had a talk about it. I was very fair. I defended him. But in bed I lay and accused him to myself. For hours.

The first thing he said the next day was (no pretending)—has she been a bitch to you?

I said, no. Not at all. Then, as if I didn’t care, why should she?

He smiled. I know what you’re feeling, he seemed to say. It made me want to slap his face. I couldn’t look as if I didn’t care, which made it worse.

He said, men are vile.

I said, the vilest thing about them is that they can say that with a smile on their faces.

That is true, he said. And there was silence. I wished I hadn’t come, I wished I’d cut him out of my life. I looked at the bedroom door. It was ajar, I could see the end of the bed.

I said, I’m not able to put life in compartments yet. That’s all.

Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I’ve more knowledge of life than you, I’ve lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what’s trivial and what’s important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don’t want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I’m not a good man. Perhaps morally I’m younger even than you are. Can you understand that?

He was only saying what I felt. I was stiff and he was supple, and it ought to be the other way round. The fault all mine. But I kept on thinking, he took me to the concert, and he came back here to her. I remembered times when I rang the bell and there had been no answer. I see now it was all sexual jealousy, but then it seemed a betrayal of principles. (I still don’t know—it’s all muddled in my mind. I can’t judge.)

I said, I’d like to hear Ravi Shankar. I couldn’t say, I forgive you.

So we listened to that. Then played chess. And he beat me. No reference to Toinette, except at the very end, on the stairs, when he said, it’s all over now.

I didn’t say anything.

She only did it for fun, he said.

But it was never the same. It was a sort of truce. I saw him a few times more, but never alone, I wrote him two letters when I was in Spain, and he sent a postcard back. I saw him once at the beginning of this month. But I’ll write about that another time. And I’ll write about the strange talk I had with the Nielsen woman.

Something Toinette said. She said, he talked about his boys and I felt so sorry for him. How they used to ask him not to go to their posh prep school, but to meet them in the town. Ashamed to have him seen. How Robert (at Marl-borough) patronizes him now.

He never talked to me about them. Perhaps he secretly thinks I belong to the same world.

A little middle-class boarding-school prig.

(Evening.) I tried to draw G.P. from memory again today. Hopeless.

C sat reading
The Catcher in the Rye
after supper. Several times I saw him look to see how many pages more he had to read.

He reads it only to show me how hard he is trying.

I was passing the front door tonight (bath) and I said, well, thank you for a lovely evening, goodbye now. And I made as if to open the door. It was locked, of course. It seems stuck, I said. And he didn’t smile, he just stood watching me. I said, It’s only a joke. I know, he said. It’s very peculiar—he made me feel a fool. Just by not smiling.

Of course G.P. was always trying to get me into bed. I don’t know why but I see that more clearly now than I ever did at the time. He shocked me, bullied me, taunted me—never in nasty ways. Obliquely. He didn’t ever force me in any way. Touch me. I mean, he’s respected me in a queer way. I don’t think he really knew himself. He wanted to shock me—to him or away from him, he didn’t know. Left it to chance.

More photos today. Not many. I said it hurt my eyes too much. And I don’t like him always ordering me about. He’s terribly obsequious, would I do this, would I oblige by… no he doesn’t say “oblige.” But it’s a wonder he doesn’t.

You ought to go in for beauty comps, he said when he was winding up his film.

Thank you, I said. (The way we talk is mad, I don’t see it till I write it down. He talks as if I’m free to go at any minute, and I’m the same.)

I bet you’d look smashing in a wotchermercallit, he said.

I looked puzzled. One of those French swimming things, he said.

A bikini? I asked.

I can’t allow talk like that, so I stared coldly at him. Is that what you mean?

To photograph like, he said, going red.

And the weird thing is, I know he means exactly that. He didn’t mean to be nasty, he wasn’t hinting at anything, he was just being clumsy. As usual. He meant literally what he said. I would be interesting to photograph in a bikini.

I used to think, it must be there. It’s very deeply suppressed, but it must be there.

But I don’t any more. I don’t think he’s suppressing anything. There’s nothing to suppress.

A lovely night-walk. There were great reaches of clear sky, no moon, sprinkles of warm white stars everywhere, like’ milky diamonds, and a beautiful wind. From the west. I made him take me round and round, ten or twelve times. The branches rustling, an owl hooting in the woods. And the sky all wild, all free, all wind and air and space and stars.

Wind full of smells and far-away places. Hopes. The sea. I am sure I could smell the sea. I said (later, of course I was gagged outside), are we near the sea? And he said, ten miles. I said, near Lewes. He said, I can’t say. As if someone else had strictly forbidden him to speak. (I often feel that with him—a horrid little cringing good nature dominated by a mean bad one.)

Indoors it couldn’t have been more different. We talked about his family again. I’d been drinking scrumpy. I do it (a little) to see if I can get him drunk and careless, but so far he won’t touch it. He’s not a teetotaller, he says. So it’s all part of his warderishness. Won’t be corrupted.

M.
Tell me some more about your family.

C.
Nothing more to tell. That’d interest
you
.

M.
That’s not an answer.

C.
It’s like I said.

M.
As I said.

C.
I used to be told I was good at English. That was before I knew you.

M.
It doesn’t matter.

C.
I suppose you got the A level and all that.

M.
Yes, I did.

C.
I got O level in Maths and Biology.

M.
(I was counting stitches—jumper—expensive French wool)
Good, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…

C.
I won a prize for hobbies.

M.
Clever you. Tell me more about your father.

C.
I told you. He was a representative. Stationery and fancy goods.

M.
A commercial traveller.

C.
They call them representatives now.

M.
He got killed in a car-crash before the war. Your mother went off with another man.

C.
She was no good. Like me.
(I gave him an icy look. Thank goodness his humour so rarely seeps out.)

M.
So your aunt took you over.

C.
Yes.

M.
Like Mrs. Joe and Pip.

C.
Who?

M.
Never mind.

C.
She’s all right. She kept me out of the orphanage.

M.
And your cousin Mabel. You’ve never said anything about her.

C.
She’s older than me. Thirty. There’s her older brother, he went out to Australia after the war to my Uncle Steve. He’s a real Australian. Been out there years. I never seen him.

M.
And haven’t you any other family?

C.
There’s relations of Uncle Dick. But they and Aunt Annie never got on.

M.
You haven’t said what Mabel’s like.

C.
She’s deformed. Spastic. Real sharp. Always wants to know everything you’ve done.

M.
She can’t walk?

C.
About the house. We had to take her out in a chair.

M.
Perhaps I’ve seen her.

C.
You haven’t missed much.

M.
Aren’t you sorry for her?

C.
It’s like you have to be sorry for her all the time. It’s Aunt Annie’s fault.

M.
Go on.

C.
She like makes everything round her deformed too. I can’t explain. Like nobody else had any right to be normal. I mean she doesn’t complain outright. It’s just looks she gives, and you have to be dead careful. Suppose, well, I say not thinking one evening, I nearly missed the bus this morning, I had to run like billy-o, sure as fate Aunt Annie would say, think yourself lucky you can run. Mabel wouldn’t say anything. She’d just look.

M.
How vile!

C.
You had to think very careful about what you said.

M.
Carefully.

C.
I mean carefully.

M.
Why didn’t you run away? Live in digs?

C.
I used to think about it.

M.
Because they were two women on their own. You were being a gent.

C.
Being a charley, more like it.
(Pathetic, his attempts at being a cynic.)

M.
And now they’re in Australia making your other relations miserable.

C.
I suppose so.

M.
Do they write letters?

C.
Yes. Not Mabel.

M.
Would you read one to me one day?

C.
What for?

M.
I’d be interested.

C.
(great inner struggle)
I got one this morning. I’ve got it on me.
(A lot of argy-bargy, but in the end he took the letter from out of his pocket.)
They’re stupid.

M.
Never mind. Read it out. All of it.

He sat by the door, and I knitted, knitted, knitted—I can’t remember the letter word for word, but it was something like this: Dear Fred (that’s the name she calls me by, he said, she doesn’t like Ferdinand—red with embarrassment). Very pleased to have yours and as I said in my last it’s your money, God has been very kind to you and you mustn’t fly up in the face of his kindness and I wish you had not taken this step, your Uncle Steve says property’s more trouble than it’s worth. I notice you don’t answer my question about the woman to clean. I know what men are and just remember what they say cleanliness is next to godliness. I have no right and you have been very generous, Fred, Uncle Steve and the boys and Gertie can’t understand why you didn’t come here with us, Gert only said this morning that you ought to be here, your place is with us, but don’t think I am not grateful. I hope the Lord will forgive me but this has been a great experience and you wouldn’t know Mabel, she is brown in the sun here, it is very nice, but I don’t like the dust. Everything gets dirty and they live in a different way to what we do at home, they speak English more like Americans (even Uncle Steve) than us. I shan’t be sorry to get home to Blackstone Rd, it worries me to think of the damp and the dirt, I hope you did what I said and aired all the rooms and linen like I said and got a good cleaning woman in like I said the same as with you, I hope.