The Collector

I knew it was silly as I was saying it. Fey. He didn’t speak, he kept staring down.

I said, now it’s your turn to tell a fairy story.

He just said, I love you.

And yes, he had more dignity than I did then and I felt small, mean. Always sneering at him, jabbing him, hating him and showing it. It was fu

I feel the sadness of his life, too, terribly. And of those of his miserable aunt and his cousin and their relatives in Australia. The great dull hopeless weight of it. Like those Henry Moore drawings of the people in the Tubes during the blitz. People who would never see, feel, dance, draw, cry at music, feel the world, the west wind. Never be in any real sense.

Just those three words, said and meant. I love you.

They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer.

His fairy story.

October 31st

Nothing. I psychoanalyzed him this evening.

He would sit so stiffly beside me.

We were looking at Goya’s etchings. Perhaps it was the etchings themselves, but he sat and I thought he wasn’t really looking at them. But thinking only of being so close to me.

His inhibition. It’s absurd. I talked at him as if he could easily be normal. As if he wasn’t a maniac keeping me prisoner here. But a nice young man who wanted a bit of chivvying from a jolly girl-friend.

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 1st

A new month, and new luck. The tu

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 begi

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 tu

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 Mi

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.