The Collector (28 page)

This has shocked me because I think everyone now except
us
(and we’re contaminated) has this selfishness and this’ brutality, whether it’s hidden, mousy, and perverse, or obvious and crude. Religion’s as good as dead, there’s nothing to hold back the New People, they’ll grow stronger and stronger and swamp us.

No, they won’t. Because of David. Because of people like Alan Sillitoe (it says on the back he was the son of a labourer). I mean the intelligent New People will always revolt and come across to our side. The New People destroy themselves because they’re so stupid. They can never keep the intelligent ones with them. Especially the young ones. We want something better than just money and keeping up with the Joneses.

But it’s a battle. It’s like being in a city and being besieged. They’re all around. And we’ve got to hold out.

It’s a battle between Caliban and myself. He is the New People and I am the Few.

I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.

He’s worse than the Arthur Seaton kind.

If Arthur Seaton saw a modern statue he didn’t like, he’d smash it. But Caliban would drape a tarpaulin round it. I don’t know which is worse. But I think Caliban’s way is.

I’m getting desperate to escape. I can’t get any relief from drawing or playing records or reading. The burning burning need I have (all prisoners must have) is for other people. Caliban is only half a person at the best of times. I want to see dozens and dozens of strange faces. Like being terribly thirsty and gulping down glass after glass of water. Exactly like that. I read once that nobody can stand more than ten years in prison, or more than one year of solitary confinement.

One just can’t imagine what prison is like from outside. You think, well, there’d be lots of time to think and read, it wouldn’t be too bad. But it is too bad. It’s the slowness of time. I’ll swear all the clocks in the world have gone centuries slower since I came here.

I shouldn’t complain. This is a luxury prison.

And there’s his diabolical cunning about the newspapers and radio and so on. I never read the papers very much, or listened to the news. But to be totally cut off. It’s so strange. I feel I’ve lost all my bearings.

I spend hours lying on the bed thinking about how to escape.

Endless.

(Afternoon.) This morning I had a talk with him. I got him to sit as a model. Then I asked him what he really wanted me to do. Should I become his mistress? But that shocked him. He went red and said he could buy
that
in London.

I told him he was a Chinese box. And he is.

The innermost box is that I should love him; in all ways. With my body, with my mind. Respect him and cherish him. It’s so utterly impossible—even if I could overcome the physical thing, how could I ever look in any way but down on him?

Battering his head on a stone wall.

I don’t want to die. I feel full of endurance. I shall
always
want to survive. I will survive.

The only unusual thing about him—how he loves me. Ordinary New People couldn’t love anything as he loves me. That is blindly. Absolutely. Like Dante and Beatrice.

He enjoys being hopelessly in love with me. I expect Dante was the same. Mooning around knowing it was all quite hopeless and getting lots of good creative material from the experience.

Though of course Caliban can’t get anything but his own miserable pleasure.

People who don’t
make
anything. I hate them.

How frightened of dying I was in those first days. I don’t want to die because I keep on thinking of the future. I’m
desperately
curious to know what life will bring to me. What will happen to me, how I’ll develop, what I’ll be in five years’ time, in ten, in thirty. The man I will marry and the places I will live in and get to know. Children. It isn’t just a selfish curiosity. This is the worst possible time in history to die. Space-travel, science, the whole world waking up and stretching itself. A new age is beginning. I know it’s dangerous. But it’s wonderful to be alive in it.

I love, I adore my age.

I keep on having thoughts today. One was: uncreative men plus opportunity-to-create equals evil men.

Another one was: killing him was breaking my word to what I believe. Some people would say—you’re only a drop, your word-breaking is only a drop, it wouldn’t matter. But all the evil in the world’s made up of little drops. It’s silly talking about the unimportance of the little drops. The little drops and the ocean are the same thing.

I’ve been daydreaming (not for the first time) about living with G.P. He deceives me, he leaves me, he is brutal and cynical with me, I am in despair. In these daydreams there isn’t much sex, it’s just our living together. In rather romantic surroundings. Sea-and-island northern landscapes. White cottages. Sometimes in the Mediterranean. We are together, very close in spirit. All silly magazine stuff, really, in the details. But there is the closeness of spirit. That is something real. And the situations I imagine (where he forsakes me) are real. I mean, it kills me to think of them.

Sometimes I’m not very far from utter despair. No one knows I am alive any more. I’m given up for dead by now, I’m accepted for dead. There’s that—the real situation. And there are the future situations I sit on the bed here and think about: my
utter
love for some man; I know I can’t do things like love by halves, I know I have love pent up in me, I shall throw myself away, lose my heart and my body and my mind and soul to some cad like G.P. Who’ll betray me. I feel it. Everything is tender and rational at first in my daydreams of living with him, but I know it wouldn’t be in fact. It would be all passion and violence. Jealousy. Despair. Sour. Something would be killed in me. He would be hurt, too.

If he really loved me he couldn’t have sent me away.

If he really loved me he would have sent me away.

Midnight.

I’ll never escape. It drives me mad. I must must must do something. I feel as if I’m at the earth’s heart. I’ve got the whole weight of the whole earth pressing in on this little box. It grows smaller smaller smaller. I can feel it contracting.

I want to scream sometimes. Till my voice is raw. To death.

I can’t write it. There aren’t the words.

Utter despair.

I’ve been like that all day. A kind of endless panic in slow-motion.

What can he have thought when he first got me here?

Something’s gone wrong in his plans. I’m not acting like the girl of his dreams I was. I’m his pig in a poke.

Is that why he keeps me? Hoping the dream Miranda will appear?

Perhaps I should be his dream-girl. Put my arms round him and kiss him. Praise him, pat him, stroke him. Kiss him.

I didn’t mean that. But it’s made me think.

Perhaps I really should kiss him. More than kiss him. Love him. Make Prince Charming step out.

I’m thinking hours between each sentence I write.

I’ve got to make him feel that finally I’ve been touched by his chivalry and so on and so on…

This is extraordinary.

He would have to act.

I am sure I can do it. At least he’s scrupulously clean. He never smells of anything but soap.

I’m going to sleep on it.

I’ve come to a tremendous decision today.

I’ve imagined being in bed with him.

It’s useless just kissing him. I’ve got to give him such a tremendous shock that he’ll have to release me. Because you can’t very well imprison someone who’s given herself to you.

I shall be in his power. I couldn’t ever go to the police. I should only want to hush it up.

It’s so obvious. It stares one in the face.

Like a really good sacrifice at chess.

It’s like drawing. You can’t nibble at a line. The boldness is the line.

I thought out all the sex facts. I wish I knew a little more about men, I wish I was absolutely sure, that I didn’t have to go on things heard, read, half understood, but I’m going to let him do what Piers wanted to do in Spain—what they call Scotch love. Get me into bed if he wants. Play with me if he wants. But not the final thing. I’m going to tell him it’s my time of the month, if he tries to go too far. But I think he’ll be so shocked that I shall be able to make him do what I want. I mean, I’m going to do all the seducing. I know it would be a terrible risk with ninety-nine men out of a hundred, but I think he’s the hundredth. He’ll stop when I tell him.

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 meanness out of the way.

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.

Oh, God.

I’ve done something terrible.

I’ve got to put it down. Look at it.