The Collector

 I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me.

 Not for his sake, but for being alive's.

    _November 1st_

 A new month, and new luck. The tunnel idea keeps nagging at me, but the difficulty till now has been something to dig the concrete out with. Then yesterday as I was doing my prison-exercise in the outer cellar I saw a nail. A big old one, down against the wall in the far corner. I dropped my handkerchief so that I could get a closer look. I couldn't pick it up, he watches me so closely. And it's awkward with bound hands. Then today, when I was by the nail (he always sits on the steps up), I said (I did it on purpose) run and get me a cigarette. They're on the chair by the door. Of course he wouldn't. He said, what's the game?

 I'll stay here, I won't move.

 Why don't you get them yourself?

 Because sometimes I like to remember the days when men were nice to me. That's all.

 I didn't think it would work. But it did. He suddenly decided that there wasn't anything I could possibly do, nothing I could pick up. (He locks things away in a drawer when I come out here.) So he went through the door. Only a second. But I stooped like lightning and got the nail up and into my skirt pocket -- specially put on -- and I was standing exactly as he left me when he jumped back. So I got my nail. And made him think he could trust me. Two birds with one stone.

 Nothing. But it seems a tremendous victory.

 I've started putting my plan into effect. For days I've been telling Caliban that I don't see why D and M and everyone else should be left in the dark about whether I still exist. At least he could tell them I'm alive and all right. Tonight after supper I told him he could buy paper from Woolworth's and use gloves and so on. He tried to wriggle out of it, as usual. But I kept at him. Every objection I squashed. And in the end I felt he really was beginning to think he might do it for me.

 I told him he could post the letter in London, to put the police off the track. And that I wanted all sorts of things from London. I've got to get him away from here for at least three or four hours. Because of the burglar alarms. And then I'm going to try my tunnel. What I've been thinking is that as the walls of this cellar (and the outer one) are stones -- not stone -- then behind the stones there must be earth. All I have to do is to get through the skin of stones and then I shall be in soft earth (I imagine).

 Perhaps it's all wild. But I'm in a fever to try it.

 The Nielsen woman.

 I'd met her twice more at G.P.'s, when there were other people there -- one was her husband, a Dane, some kind of importer. He spoke perfect English, so perfect it sounded wrong. Affected.

 I met her one day when she was coming out of the hairdresser's and I'd been in to make an appointment for Caroline. She had on that special queasy-bright look women like her put on for girls of my age. What Minny calls welcome-to-the-tribe-of-women. It means they're going to treat you like a grown-up, but they don't really think you are and anyhow they're jealous of you.

 She would take me for coffee. I was silly, I should have lied. It was all rhubarb, about me, about her daughter, about art. She knows people and tried to dazzle me with names. But it's what people feel about art that I respect. Not what or who they know.

 I know she can't be a lesbian, but she clings like that to one's words. Things in her eyes she doesn't dare tell you. But wants you to ask her to.

 You don't know what's gone on and what still goes on between G.P. and me, she seemed to say. I dare you to ask me.

 She talked on and on about Charlotte Street in the late 'thirties and the war. Dylan Thomas. G.P.

 He likes you, she said.

 I know, I answered.

 But it was a shock. Both that she should know (had he told her?) and that she wanted to discuss it. I know she did.

 He's always fallen for the really pretty ones, she said.

 She wanted _terribly_ to discuss it.

 Then it was her daughter.

 She said, she's sixteen now. I just can't get across to her. Sometimes when I talk to her I feel like an animal in a zoo. She just stands outside and watches me.

 I knew she'd said it before. Or read it somewhere. You can always tell.

 They're all the same, women like her. It's not the teenagers and daughters who are different. We haven't changed, we're just young. It's the silly new middle-aged people who've got to be young who've changed. This desperate silly trying to stay with us. They can't be with us. We don't want them to be with us. We don't want them to wear our clothes-styles and use our language and have our interests. They imitate us so badly that we can't respect them.