The Collector - Страница 42

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 2

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 funny. I probably should speak for him.

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

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

December 3

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.

Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.

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.

It’s simply that. He has the secret of life in him. Something spring-like. Not immoral.

It’s as if I’d only seen him at twilight; and now suddenly I see him at dawn. He is the same, but everything is different.

I looked in the mirror today and I could see it in my eyes. They look much older and younger. It sounds impossible in words. But that’s exactly it. I am older and younger. I am older because I have learnt, I am younger because a lot of me consisted of things older people had taught me. All the mud of their stale ideas on the shoe of me.

The new shoe of me.

The power of women! I’ve never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

We’re so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we’re stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can’t stand ours.

I think — I will give myself to G.P. He can have me. And whatever he does to me I shall still have my woman-me he can never touch.

All this is wild talk. But I feel full of urges. New independence.

I don’t think about now. Today. I know I’m going to escape. I feel it. I can’t explain. Caliban can never win against me.

I think of paintings I shall do.

Last night I thought of one, it was a sort of butter-yellow (farm-butter-yellow) field rising to a white luminous sky and the sun just rising. A strange rose-pink, I knew it exactly, full of hushed stillness, the beginning of things, lark-song without larks.

Two strange contradictory dreams.

The first one was very simple. I was walking in the fields, I don’t know who I was with, but it was someone I liked very much, a man. G.P. perhaps. The sun shining on young corn. And suddenly we saw swallows flying low over the corn. I could see their backs gleaming, like dark blue silk. They were very low, twittering all around us, all flying in the same direction, low and happy. And I felt full of happiness. I said, how extraordinary, look at the swallows. It was very simple, the unexpected swallows and the sun and the green corn. I was filled with happiness. The purest spring feeling. Then I woke up.

Later I had another dream. I was at the window on the first floor of a large house (Ladymont?) and there was a black horse below. It was angry, but I felt safe because it was below and outside. But suddenly it turned and galloped at the house and to my horror it leapt gigantically up and straight at me with bared teeth. It came crashing through the window. Even then I thought, it will kill itself, I am safe. But it sprawled and flailed round in the small room and I suddenly realized it was going to attack me. There was nowhere to escape. I woke again, I had to put on the light.

It was violence. It was all I hate and all I fear.

December 4

I shan’t go on keeping a diary when I leave here. It’s not healthy. It keeps me sane down here, gives me somebody to talk to. But it’s vain. You write what you want to hear.

It’s funny. You don’t do that when you draw yourself. No temptation to cheat.

It’s sick, sick, all this thinking about me. Morbid.

I long to paint and paint other things. Fields, southern houses, landscapes, vast wide-open things in vast wide-open light.

It’s what I’ve been doing today. Moods of light recalled from Spain. Ochre walls burnt white in the sunlight. The walls of Avila. Cordoba courtyards. I don’t try to reproduce the place, but the light of the place.

Fiat lux.

I’ve been playing the Modern Jazz Quartet’s records over and over again. There’s no night in their music, no smoky dives. Bursts and sparkles and little fizzes of light, starlight, and sometimes high noon, tremendous everywhere light, like chandeliers of diamonds floating in the sky.

December 5

G.P.

The Rape of Intelligence. By the moneyed masses, the New People.

Things he says. They shock you, but you remember them. They stick. Hard, meant to last.

I’ve been doing skyscapes all day. I just draw a line an inch from the bottom. That’s the earth. Then I think of nothing but the sky. June sky, December, August, spring-rain, thunder, dawn, dusk. I’ve done dozens of skies. Pure sky, nothing else. Just the simple line and the skies above.

A strange thought: I would not want this not to have happened. Because if I escape I shall be a completely different and I think better person. Because if I don’t escape, if something dreadful happened, I shall still know that the person I was and would have stayed if this hadn’t happened was not the person I now want to be.

It’s like firing a pot. You have to risk the cracking and the warping.

Caliban’s very quiet. A sort of truce.

I’m going to ask to go up tomorrow. I want to see if he’s actually doing anything.

Today I asked him to bind me and gag me and let me sit at the foot of the cellar steps with the door out open. In the end he agreed. So I could look up and see the sky. A pale grey sky. I saw birds fly across, pigeons, I think. I heard outside sounds. This is the first proper daylight I’ve seen for two months. It lived. It made me cry.

December 6

I’ve been up for a bath and we’ve been looking at the room I shall occupy. He has done some things. He’s going to see if he can’t find an antique Windsor chair. I drew it for him.

It’s made me feel happy.

I’m restless. I can’t write here. I feel half-escaped already.

The thing that made me feel he was more normal was this little bit of dialogue.

M. (we were standing in the room) Why don’t you just let me come and live up here as your guest? If I gave you my word of honour?

C. If fifty people came to me, real honest respectable people, and swore blind you wouldn’t escape, I wouldn’t trust them. I wouldn’t trust the whole world.

M. You can’t go all through life trusting no one.

C. You don’t know what being alone is.