The Collector

A psychiatrist has told him he won’t ever be able to do it.

He said he used to imagine us lying in bed together. Just lying. Nothing else. I offered to do that. But he didn’t want to. Deep down in him, side by side with the beastliness, the sourness, there is a tremendous i

He said he loved me, even so.

I said, what you love is your own love. It’s not love, it’s selfishness. It’s not me you think of, but what you feel about me.

I don’t know what it is, he said.

And then I made a mistake, I felt it had all been a sacrifice in vain, I felt I had to make him appreciate what I’d done, that he ought to let me go—so I tried to tell him. And his true self came out.

He got beastly. Wouldn’t answer me.

We were further apart than ever. I said I pitied him and he flew at me. It was terrible. It made me cry.

The terrible coldness, the inhumanity of it.

Being his prisoner. Having to stay. Still.

And realizing at last that this is what he is.

Impossible to understand. What is he? What does he want? Why am I here if he can’t do it?

As if I’d lit a fire in the darkness to try and warm us. And all I’d done was to see his real face by it.

The last thing I said was—We can’t be further apart. We’ve been naked in front of each other.

But we are.

I feel better now.

I’m glad nothing worse happened. I was mad to take the risk.

It’s enough to have survived.

December 1st

He’s been down, I’ve been out in the cellar, and it is absolutely plain. He’s angry with me. He’s never been angry like this before. This isn’t a pet. It’s a deep suppressed anger.

It makes me furious. Nobody could ever understand how much I put into yesterday. The effort of giving, of risking, of understanding. Of pushing back every natural instinct.

It’s him. And it’s this weird male thing. Now I’m no longer nice. They sulk if you don’t give, and hate you when you do. Intelligent men must despise themselves for being like that. Their illogicality.

Sour men and wounded women.

Of course, I’ve discovered his secret. He hates that.

I’ve thought and thought about it.

He must always have known he couldn’t do anything with me. Yet all his talk about loving me. That must mean something.

This is what I think it is. He can’t have any normal pleasure from me. His pleasure is keeping me prisoner. Thinking of all the other men who would envy him if they knew. Having me.

So my being nice to him is ridiculous. I want to be so unpleasant that he gets no pleasure from having me. I’m going to fast again. Have absolutely nothing to do with him.

Strange ideas.

That I’ve done for the first time in my life something original. Something hardly anyone else can have done. I steeled myself when we were naked. I learnt what “to steel oneself” meant.

The last of the Ladymont me. It’s dead.

I remember driving Piers’s car somewhere near Carcasso

But it proved I could do it.

(Late afternoon.) Reading The Tempest again all the afternoon. Not the same at all, now what’s happened has happened. The pity Shakespeare feels for his Caliban, I feel (beneath the hate and disgust) for my Caliban. Half-creatures.

“Not honour’d with a human shape.”

“Caliban my slave, who never yields us kind answer.”

“Whom stripes may move, not kindness.”

PROS. …and lodged thee

In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate

The honour of my child.

CAL. O ho, O ho!—Would’t had been done!

Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else

This isle with Calibans.…

Prospero’s contempt for him. His knowing that being kind is useless.

Stephano and Trinculo are the football pools. Their wine, the money he won.

Act III, scene 2. “I cried to dream again.” Poor Caliban. But only because he never won the pools.

“I’ll be wise hereafter.”

“O brave new world.”

O sick new world.

He’s just gone. I said I would fast unless he let me come upstairs. Fresh air and daylight every day. He hedged. He was beastly. Sarcastic. He actually said I was “forgetting who was boss.”

He’s changed. He frightens me now.

I’ve given him until tomorrow morning to make up his mind.

December 2nd

I’m to go upstairs. He’s going to convert a room. He said it would take a week. I said, all right, but if it’s another put-off…

We’ll see.

I lay in bed last night and thought of G.P. I thought of being in bed with him. I wanted to be in bed with him. I wanted the marvellous, the fantastic ordinariness of him.

His promiscuity is creative. Vital. Even though it hurts. He creates love and life and excitement around him; he lives, the people he loves remember him.

I’ve always felt like it sometimes. Promiscuous. Anyone I see, even just some boy in the Tube, some man, I think what would he be like in bed. I look at the mouths and their hands, put on a prim expression and think about them having me in bed.

Even Toinette, getting into bed with anyone. I used to think it was messy. But love is beautiful, any love. Even just sex. The only thing that is ugly is this frozen lifeless utter lack-love between Caliban and me.

This morning I was imagining I’d escaped and that Caliban was in court. I was speaking for him. I said his case was tragic, he needed sympathy and psychiatry. Forgiveness.

I wasn’t being noble. I despise him too much to hate him.

It’s fu

I knew we shouldn’t be able to meet again.

I could never cure him. Because I’m his disease.

December 3rd

I shall go and have an affaire with G.P.

I’ll marry him if he wants.

I want the adventure, the risk of marrying him.

I’m sick of being young. Inexperienced.

Clever at knowing but not at living.

I want his children in me.

My body doesn’t count any more. If he just wants that he can have it. I couldn’t ever be a Toinette. A collector of men.

Being cleverer (as I thought) than most men, and cleverer than all the girls I knew. I always thought I knew more, felt more, understood more.

But I don’t even know enough to handle Caliban.

All sorts of bits left over from Ladymont days. From the days when I was a nice little middle-class doctor’s daughter. They’ve gone now. When I was at Ladymont I thought I could manipulate a pencil very nicely. And then when I went to London, I began to find I couldn’t. I was surrounded by people who were just as skilled as I was. More so. I haven’t begun to know how to handle my life—or anyone else’s.

I’m the one who needs lameducking.

It’s like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it’s silly. A toy I’ve played with too often. It’s a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard.

I

G.P.

I shall be hurt, lost, battered and buffeted. But it will be like being in a gale of light, after this black hole.