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The Collector

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It’s because I never see anyone else. He becomes the norm. I forget to compare.

Another time G.P. It was soon after the icy douche (what he said about my work). I was restless one evening. I went round to his flat. About ten. He had his dressing-gown on.

I was just going to bed, he said.

I wanted to hear some music, I said. I’ll go away. But I didn’t.

He said, it’s late.

I said I was depressed. It had been a beastly day and Caroline had been so silly at supper.

He let me go up and made me sit on the divan and he put on some music and turned out the lights and the moon came through the window. It fell on my legs and lap through the skylight, a lovely slow silver moon. Sailing. And he sat in the armchair on the other side of the room, in the shadows.

It was the music.

The Goldberg Variations.

There was one towards the end that was very slow, very simple, very sad, but so beautiful beyond words or drawing or anything but music, beautiful there in the moonlight. Moon-music, so silvery, so far, so noble.

The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.

Accepting the sadness. Knowing that to pretend it was all gay was treachery. Treachery to everyone sad at that moment, everyone ever sad, treachery to such music, such truth.

In all the fuss and anxiety and the shoddiness and the business of London, making a career, getting pashes, art, learning, grabbing frantically at experience, suddenly this silent silver room full of that music.

Like lying on one’s back as we did in Spain when we slept out looking up between the fig-branches into the star-corridors, the great seas and oceans of stars. Knowing what it was to be in a universe.

I cried. In silence.

At the end he said, now can I go to bed? Gently, making fun of me a little bit, bringing me back to earth. And I went. I don’t think we said anything. I can’t remember. He had his little dry smile, he could see I was moved.

His perfect tact.

I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me.

Not for his sake, but for being alive’s.

November 1

A new month, and new luck. The tunnel idea keeps nagging at me, but the difficulty till now has been something to dig the concrete out with. Then yesterday as I was doing my prison-exercise in the outer cellar I saw a nail. A big old one, down against the wall in the far corner. I dropped my handkerchief so that I could get a closer look. I couldn’t pick it up, he watches me so closely. And it’s awkward with bound hands. Then today, when I was by the nail (he always sits on the steps up), I said (I did it on purpose) run and get me a cigarette. They’re on the chair by the door. Of course he wouldn’t. He said, what’s the game?

I’ll stay here, I won’t move.

Why don’t you get them yourself?

Because sometimes I like to remember the days when men were nice to me. That’s all.

I didn’t think it would work. But it did. He suddenly decided that there wasn’t anything I could possibly do, nothing I could pick up. (He locks things away in a drawer when I come out here.) So he went through the door. Only a second. But I stooped like lightning and got the nail up and into my skirt pocket — specially put on — and I was standing exactly as he left me when he jumped back. So I got my nail. And made him think he could trust me. Two birds with one stone.

Nothing. But it seems a tremendous victory.

I’ve started putting my plan into effect. For days I’ve been telling Caliban that I don’t see why D and M and everyone else should be left in the dark about whether I still exist. At least he could tell them I’m alive and all right. Tonight after supper I told him he could buy paper from Woolworth’s and use gloves and so on. He tried to wriggle out of it, as usual. But I kept at him. Every objection I squashed. And in the end I felt he really was beginning to think he might do it for me.

I told him he could post the letter in London, to put the police off the track. And that I wanted all sorts of things from London. I’ve got to get him away from here for at least three or four hours. Because of the burglar alarms. And then I’m going to try my tunnel. What I’ve been thinking is that as the walls of this cellar (and the outer one) are stones — not stone — then behind the stones there must be earth. All I have to do is to get through the skin of stones and then I shall be in soft earth (I imagine).

Perhaps it’s all wild. But I’m in a fever to try it.

The Nielsen woman.

I’d met her twice more at G.P.’s, when there were other people there — one was her husband, a Dane, some kind of importer. He spoke perfect English, so perfect it sounded wrong. Affected.

I met her one day when she was coming out of the hairdresser’s and I’d been in to make an appointment for Caroline. She had on that special queasy-bright look women like her put on for girls of my age. What Minny calls welcome-to-the-tribe-of-women. It means they’re going to treat you like a grown-up, but they don’t really think you are and anyhow they’re jealous of you.

She would take me for coffee. I was silly, I should have lied. It was all rhubarb, about me, about her daughter, about art. She knows people and tried to dazzle me with names. But it’s what people feel about art that I respect. Not what or who they know.

I know she can’t be a lesbian, but she clings like that to one’s words. Things in her eyes she doesn’t dare tell you. But wants you to ask her to.

You don’t know what’s gone on and what still goes on between G.P. and me, she seemed to say. I dare you to ask me.

She talked on and on about Charlotte Street in the late ‘thirties and the war. Dylan Thomas. G.P.

He likes you, she said.

I know, I answered.

But it was a shock. Both that she should know (had he told her?) and that she wanted to discuss it. I know she did.

He’s always fallen for the really pretty ones, she said.

She wanted terribly to discuss it.

Then it was her daughter.

She said, she’s sixteen now. I just can’t get across to her. Sometimes when I talk to her I feel like an animal in a zoo. She just stands outside and watches me.

I knew she’d said it before. Or read it somewhere. You can always tell.

They’re all the same, women like her. It’s not the teenagers and daughters who are different. We haven’t changed, we’re just young. It’s the silly new middle-aged people who’ve got to be young who’ve changed. This desperate silly trying to stay with us. They can’t be with us. We don’t want them to be with us. We don’t want them to wear our clothes-styles and use our language and have our interests. They imitate us so badly that we can’t respect them.

But it made me feel, that meeting with her, that G.P. did love me (want me). That there’s a deep bond between us — his loving me in his way, my liking him very much (even loving him, but not sexually) in my way — a feeling that we’re groping towards a compromise. A sort of fog of unsolved desire and sadness between us. Something other people (like the N woman) couldn’t ever understand.

Two people in a desert, trying to find both themselves and an oasis where they can live together.

I’ve begun to think more and more like this — it is terribly cruel of fate to have put these twenty years between us. Why couldn’t he be my age, or me his? So the age thing is no longer the all-important factor that puts love right out of the question but a sort of cruel wall fate has built between us. I don’t think any more, the wall is between us, I think, the wall keeps us apart.

November 2

He produced the paper after supper, and dictated an absurd letter that I had to write out.

Then the trouble started. I had prepared a little note, written in my smallest writing, and I slipped it into the envelope when he wasn’t looking. It was very small, and in the best spy stories wouldn’t have been noticed.

He did.

It upset him. Made him see things in the cold light of reality. But he was genuinely shocked that I should be frightened. He can’t imagine himself killing or raping me, and that is something.

I let him have his pet, but in the end I went and tried to be nice to him (because I knew I must get him to send that letter). It was a job. I’ve never known him in such a huff.

Wouldn’t he call it a day, and let me go home?

No.

What did he want to do with me then? Take me to bed?

He gave me such a look, as if I was being really disgusting.

Then I had an inspiration. I acted a little charade. His oriental slave. He likes me to play the fool. The stupidest things I do he calls witty. He has even got in the habit of joining in, stumbling after me (not that I’m very dazzling) like a giraffe.

So I got him to let me write another letter. He looked in the envelope again.

Then I talked him into going to London, as my plan requires. I gave him a ridiculous list of things (most of them I don’t want, but it’ll keep him busy) to buy. I told him it was impossible to trace a letter posted in London. So he finally agreed. He likes me to wheedle, the brute.