The Collector

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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.

October 22

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.

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 Cruik-shank. 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.