The Collector

 I was looking at him and his face suddenly went minutely stiff, as if he'd been caught off guard. It wasn't done for me to see, it was the minutest change in the set of his mouth. He just gave her one look. Almost amused. But his voice wasn't. It was icy cold.

 I must go now. Goodbye. The goodbye was for me. It wrote me off. Or it said -- so you can put up with this? I mean (looking back on it) he seemed to be teaching _me_ a lesson. I had to choose. Caroline's way, or his.

 And he was gone, we didn't even answer, and Caroline was looking after him, and shrugging and looking at me and saying, well, really.

 I watched him go out, his hands in his pockets. I was red. Caroline was furious, trying to slide out of it. ("He's always like that, he does it deliberately.") Sneering at his painting all the way home ("second-rate Paul Nash" -- ridiculously unfair). And me feeling so angry with her, and sorry for her at the same time. I couldn't speak. I couldn't be sorry for her, but I couldn't tell her he was right.

 Between them Caroline and M have every quality I hate in other women. I had a sort of despair for days afterwards, thinking how much of their rotten, pretentious blood I must have in me. Of course, there are times when I like Caroline. Her briskness. Her enthusiasm. Her kindness. And even all the pretentiousness that's so horrid next to the real thing -- well, it's better than nothing. I used to think the world of her when she came to stay. I used to love staying with her. She backed me up when there was the great family war about my future. All that till I lived with her and saw through her. Grew up. (I'm being a Hard Young Woman.)

 Then a week later I ran into the lift at the Tube and he was the only other person there. I said hallo, too brightly. Went red again. He just nodded as if he didn't want to speak, and then at the bottom (it was vanity, I couldn't bear to be'lumped with Caroline) I said, I'm sorry my aunt said that at Kenwood.

 He said, she always irritates me. I knew he didn't want to talk about it. As we went towards the platform, I said, she's frightened of seeming behind the times.

 Aren't you? -- and he gave me one of his dry little smiles. I thought, he doesn't like me playing at "us" against "her."

 We were passing a film poster and he said, that's a good film. Have you seen it? Do.

 When we came out on the platform, he said, come round one day. But leave your bloody aunt at home. And he smiled. A little infectious mischievous smile. Not his age, at all. Then he walked off. So by-himself. So indifferent.

 So I did go round. One Saturday morning. He was surprised. I had to sit in silence for twenty minutes with him and the weird Indian music. He got straight back on to the divan and lay with his eyes shut, as if I shouldn't have come and I felt I ought never to have come (especially without telling C), and I felt as well that it really was a bit much, a pose. I couldn't relax. At the end he asked me about myself, curtly, as if it was all rather a bore. And I stupidly tried to impress him. Do the one thing I shouldn't. Show off. I kept on thinking, he didn't really mean me to come round.

 Suddenly he cut me short and took me round the room and made me look at things.

 His studio. The most beautiful room. I always feel happy there. Everything in harmony. Everything expressing only him (it's not deliberate, he hates "interior decoration" and gimmicks and Vogue). But it's all him. Toinette, with her silly female _House and Garden_ ideas of austere good taste, calling it "cluttered." I could have bitten her head off. The feeling that someone lives all his life in it, works in it, thinks in it, is it.

 And we thawed out. I stopped trying to be clever.

 He showed me how he gets his "haze" effect. Tonksing gouache. With all his little home-made tools.

 Some friends of his came in, Barber and Frances Cruik-shank. He said, this is Miranda Grey I can't stand her aunt, all in one breath, and they laughed, they were old friends. I wanted to leave. But they were going for a walk, they had come in to make him go with them, and they wanted me to go too. Barber Cruikshank did; he had special seduction eyes for me.

 Supposing aunt sees us, G.P. said. Barber's got the foulest reputation in Cornwall.

 I said, she's my aunt. Not my duenna.