The Collector - Страница 25

When I first met him I told everyone how marvellous he was. Then a reaction set in, I thought I was getting a silly schoolgirl hero-pash on him, and the other thing began to happen. It was all too emotional.

Because he’s changed me more than anything or anybody. More than London, more than the Slade.

It’s not just that he’s seen so much more life. Had so much more artistic experience. And is known. But he says exactly what he thinks, and he always makes me think. That’s the big thing. He makes me question myself. How many times have I disagreed with him? And then a week later with someone else I find I’m arguing as he would argue. Judging people by his standards.

He’s chipped off all (well, some of, anyway) my silliness, my stupid fussy frilly ideas about life and art, and modern art. My feyness. I’ve never been the same since he told me how he hated fey women. I even learnt the word from him.

List of the ways in which he has altered me. Either directly. Or confirmed alterations in progress.

1. If you are a real artist, you give your whole being to your art. Anything short of that, then you are not an artist. Not what G.P. calls a “maker.”

2. You don’t gush. You don’t have little set-pieces or set-ideas you gush out to impress people with.

3. You have to be Left politically because the Socialists are the only people who care, for all their mistakes. They feel, they want to better the world.

4. You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you’re going to paint. The most terrible bad form.

5. If you feel something deeply, you’re not ashamed to show your feeling.

6. You accept that you are English. You don’t pretend that you’d rather be French or Italian or something else. (Piers always talking about his American grandmother.)

7. But you don’t compromise with your background. You cut off all the old you that gets in the way of the maker you. If you’re suburban (as I realize D and M are — their laughing at suburbia is just a blind), you throw away (cauterize) the suburbs. If you’re working class, you cauterize the working class in you. And the same, whatever class you are, because class is primitive and silly.

(It’s not only me. Look at that time Louise’s boy-friend — the miner’s son from Wales — met him, and how they argued and snarled at each other, and we were all against G.P. for being so contemptuous about working-class people and working-class life. Calling them animals, not human beings. And David Evans, all white and stammering, don’t you tell me my father’s a bloody animal I’ve got to kick out of the way, and G.P. saying I’ve never hurt an animal in my life, you can always make out a case for hurting human beings, but human animals deserve every sympathy. And then David Evans coming up to me last month and actually admitting it had changed him, that evening.)

8. You hate the political business of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don’t have any time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don’t go to silly films, even if you want to; you don’t read cheap newspapers; you don’t listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don’t waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.

I must have always wanted to believe in those things; I did believe in them in a vague sort of way, before I met him. But he’s made me believe them; it’s the thought of him that makes me feel guilty when I break the rules.

If he’s made me believe them, that means he’s made a large part of the new me.

If I had a fairy godmother — please, make G.P. twenty years younger. And please, make him physically attractive to me.

How he would despise that!

It’s odd (and I feel a little guilty) but I have been feeling happier today than at any time since I came here. A feeling — all will turn out for the best. Partly because I did something this morning. I tried to escape. Then, Caliban has accepted it. I mean if he was going to attack me, he’d surely do it at some time when he had a reason to be angry. As he was this morning. He has tremendous self-control, in some ways.

I know I also feel happy because I’ve been not here for most of the day. I’ve been mainly thinking about G.P. In his world, not this one here. I remembered so much. I would have liked to write it all down. I gorged myself on memories. This world makes that world seem so real, so living, so beautiful. Even the sordid parts of it.

And partly, too, it’s been a sort of indulging in wicked vanity about myself. Remembering things G.P. has said to me, and other people. Knowing I am rather a special person. Knowing I am intelligent, knowing that I am beginning to understand life much better than most people of my age. Even knowing that I shall never be so stupid as to be vain about it, but be grateful, be terribly glad (especially after this) to be alive, to be who I am — Miranda, and unique.

I shall never let anyone see this. Even if it is the truth, it must sound vain.

Just as I never let other girls see that I know I am pretty; nobody knows how I’ve fallen over myself not to take that unfair advantage. Wandering male eyes, even the nicest, I’ve snubbed.

Minny: one day when I’d been gushing about her dress when she was going out to a dance. She said, shut up. You’re so pretty you don’t even have to try.

G.P. saying, you’ve every kind of face.

Wicked.

October 21

I’m making him cook better. Absolute ban on frozen food. I must have fruit, green vegetables. I have steak. Salmon. I ordered him to get caviare yesterday. It irritates me that I can’t think of enough rare foods I haven’t had and have wanted to have.

Pig.

Caviare is wonderful.

I’ve had another bath. He daren’t refuse, I think he thinks “ladies” fall down dead if they don’t have a bath when they want one.

I’ve put a message down the place. In a little plastic bottle with a yard of red ribbon round it. I hope it will become unrolled and someone may see it. Somewhere. Sometime. They ought to find the house easily enough. He was silly to tell me about the date over the door. I had to end by saying THIS IS NOT A HOAX. Terribly difficult not to make it sound like a silly joke. And I said anyone ringing up D and telling him would get £25. I’m going to launch a bottle on the sea (hmm) every time I have a bath.

He’s taken down all the brass gewgaws on the landing and stairs. And the horrible viridian-orange-magenta paintings of Majorcan fishing-villages. The poor place sighs with relief.

I like being upstairs. It’s nearer freedom. Everything’s locked. All the windows in the front of the house have indoor shutters. The others are padlocked. (Two cars passed tonight, but it must be a very unimportant road.)

I’ve also started to educate him. Tonight in the lounge (my hands tied, of course) we went through a book of paintings. No mind of his own. I don’t think he listens half the time.

He’s thinking about sitting near me and straining to be near without touching. I don’t know if it’s sex, or fear that I’m up to some trick.

If he does think about the pictures, he accepts everything I say. If I said Michelangelo’s David was a frying-pan he’d say — “I see.”

Such people. I must have stood next to them in the Tube, passed them in the street, of course I’ve overheard them and I knew they existed. But never really believed they exist. So totally blind. It never seemed possible.

Dialogue. He was sitting still looking at the book with an Art-Is-Wonderful air about him (for my benefit, not because he believes it, of course).

M. Do you know what’s really odd about this house? There aren’t any books. Except what you’ve bought for me.

C. Some upstairs.

M. About butterflies.

C. Others.

M. A few measly detective novels. Don’t you ever read proper books — real books? (Silence.) Books about important things by people who really feel about life. Not just paperbacks to kill time on a train journey. You know, books?

C. Light novels are more my line. (He’s like one of those boxers. You wish he’d lie down and be knocked out.)

M. You can jolly well read The Catcher in the Rye. I’ve almost finished it. Do you know I’ve read it twice and I’m five years younger than you are?

C. I’ll read it.

M. It’s not a punishment.

C. I looked at it before I brought it down.

M. And you didn’t like it.

C. I’ll try it.

M. You make me sick.

Silence then. I felt unreal, as if it was a play and I couldn’t remember who I was in it.

And I asked him earlier today why he collected butterflies.

C. You get a nicer class of people.

M. You can’t collect them just because of that.

C. It was a teacher I had. When I was a kid. He showed me how. He collected. Didn’t know much. Still set the old way. (Something to do with the angle of the wings. The modern way is to have them at right angles.) And my uncle. He was interested in nature. He always helped.

M. He sounds nice.