The Collector

Even if it came to the point. He didn’t stop. I’d take the risk.

There are two things. One’s the need to make him let me go. The other’s me. Something I wrote on Nov. 7th—“I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching.” But I’m not being to the full at all. I’m just sitting and watching. Not only here. With G.P.

All this Vestal Virgin talk about “saving yourself up” for the right man. I’ve always despised it. Yet I’ve always held back.

I’m mean with my body.

I’ve got to get this mea

I’ve got sunk in a sort of despair. Something will happen, I say. But nothing will, unless I make it.

I must act.

Another thing I wrote (one writes things and the implications shriek—it’s like suddenly realizing one’s deaf), “I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.”

Therefore with generosity (I give myself) and gentleness (I kiss the beast) and no-shame (I do what I do of my own free will) and forgiveness (he can’t help himself).

Even a baby. His baby. Anything. For freedom.

The more I think about it the more I feel sure that this is the way.

He has some secret. He must want me physically.

Perhaps he’s “no good.”

Whatever it is, it will come out.

We’ll know where we are.

I haven’t written much about G.P. these last days. But I think about him a great deal. The first and last thing I look at every day is his picture. I begin to hate that unknown girl who was his model. He must have gone to bed with her. Perhaps she was his first wife. I shall ask him when I get out.

Because the first thing I shall do—the first real positive thing, after I’ve seen the family, will be to go to see him. To tell him that he has been always in my thoughts. That he is the most important person I have ever met. The most real. That I am jealous of every woman who has ever slept with him. I still can’t say that I love him. But now I begin to see that it’s because I don’t know what love is. I’m Emma with her silly little clever-clever theories of love and marriage, and love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love.

Perhaps he would be dry and cold when it came to it. Say I’m too young, he wasn’t ever really serious, and—a thousand things. But I’m not afraid. I would risk it.

Perhaps he’s in mid-affaire with somebody else.

I’d say, I’ve come back because I’m not sure any more that I’m not in love with you.

I’d say, I’ve been naked with a man I loathed. I’ve been at bottom.

I’d let him have me.

But I still couldn’t bear to see him sneaking off with someone else. Reducing it all to sex. I should wither up and die inside if he did.

I know it’s not very emancipated of me.

This is what I feel.

Sex doesn’t matter. Love does.

This afternoon I wanted to ask Caliban to post a letter to G.P. from me. Quite mad. Of course he wouldn’t. He’d be jealous. But I so need to be walking up the stairs and pushing open the studio door, and seeing him at his bench, looking over his shoulder at me, as if he’s not in the least interested to see who it is. Standing there, with his faint, faint smile and eyes that understand things so quickly.

This is useless. I’m thinking of the price before the painting.

Tomorrow. I must act now.

I started today really. I’ve called him Ferdinand (not Caliban) three times, and complimented him on a horrid new tie. I’ve smiled at him, I’ve dutifully tried to look as if I like everything about him. He certainly hasn’t given any sign of having noticed it. But he won’t know what’s hit him tomorrow.

I can’t sleep. I’ve got up again and put on G.P.’s clavichord record. Perhaps he’s been listening to it, too, and thinking of me. The Invention I like best is the one after the one he loves best—he loves the fifth, and I the sixth. So we lie side by side in Bach. I always used to think Bach was a bore. Now he overwhelms me, he is so human, so full of moods and gentleness and wonderful tunes and things so simple-deep I play them over and over again as once I used to copy drawings I liked.

I think, perhaps I’ll just try putting my arms round him and kissing him. No more. But he’d grow to like that. It would drag on. It’s got to be a shock.

All this business, it’s bound up with my bossy attitude to life. I’ve always known where I’m going, how I want things to happen. And they have happened as I have wanted, and I have taken it for granted that they have because I know where I’m going. But I have been lucky in all sorts of things.

I’ve always tried to happen to life; but it’s time I let life happen to me.

November 30th

Oh, God.

I’ve done something terrible.

I’ve got to put it down. Look at it.

It is so amazing. That I did it. That what happened happened. That he is what he is. That I am what I am. Things left like this.

Worse than ever before.

I decided to do it this morning. I knew I had to do something extraordinary. To give myself a shock as well as him.

I arranged to have a bath. I was nice to him all day.

I dolled myself up after the bath. Oceans of Mitsouko. I stood in front of the fire, showing my bare feet for his benefit. I was nervous. I didn’t know if I could go through with it. And having my hands bound. But I had three glasses of sherry quickly.

I shut my eyes then and went to work.

I made him sit down and then I sat down on his lap. He was so stiff, so shocked, that I had to go on. If he’d clutched at me, perhaps I’d have stopped. I let the housecoat fall open, but he just sat there with me on his lap. As if we had never met before and this was some silly party game. Two strangers at a party, who didn’t much like each other.

In a nasty perverted way it was exciting. A woman-in-me reaching to a man-in-him. I can’t explain, it was also the feeling that he didn’t know what to do. That he was sheer virgin. There was an old lady of Cork who took a young priest for a walk. I must have been drunk.

I had to force him to kiss me. He made a sort of feeble pretence of being afraid that he might lose his head. I don’t care if you do, I said. And I kissed him again. He did kiss me back then, as if he wanted to press his wretched thin inhibited mouth right through my head. His mouth was sweet. He smelt clean and I shut my eyes. It wasn’t so bad.

But then he suddenly went away by the window and he wouldn’t come back. He wanted to run away, but he couldn’t, so he stood by his desk, half turned, while I knelt half-naked by the fire and let my hair down, just to make it quite obvious. In the end I had to go up to him and bring him back to the fire. I made him undo my hands, he was like someone in a trance, and then I undressed him and I undressed myself.

I said, don’t be nervous, I want to do this. Just be natural. But he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t. I did everything I could.

But nothing happened. He wouldn’t thaw out. He did hold me tight once. But it wasn’t natural. Just a desperate imitation of what he must think the real thing’s like. Pathetically unconvincing.

He can’t do it.

There’s no man in him.

I got up, we were lying on the sofa, and knelt by him and told him not to worry. Mothered him. We put our clothes back on.

And gradually it all came out. The truth about him. And later, his real self.