The Collector

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31

(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.)

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