The Collector

Hampstead residents have been increasingly concerned in recent months about prowling “wolves” in cars. Piers Broughton, a fellow-student and close friend of Miranda, told me in the coffee-bar he often took Miranda to, that she seemed perfectly happy the day of her disappearance and had arranged to go to an exhibition with him only today. He said, “Miranda knows what London is like. She’s the last person to take a lift from a stranger or anything like that. I’m most terribly worried about all this.”

A spokesman for the Slade School said, “She is one of our most promising second-year students. We are sure that there is some quite harmless explanation for her disappearance. Artistic young people have their whims.”

There the mystery rests.

The police are asking anyone who saw Miranda on Tuesday evening, or who heard or noticed anything suspicious in the Hampstead area, to get in touch with them.

They said what clothes she was wearing and so on and there was a photo. Another paper said the police were going to drag the ponds on Hampstead Heath. One talked about Piers Broughton and how he and she were unofficially engaged. I wondered if he was the beatnik I saw her with. Another said, “She is one of the most popular students, always willing to help.” They all said she was pretty. There were photos. If she was ugly it would all have been two lines on the back page.

I sat in the van on the road verge on the way back and read all the papers said. It gave me a feeling of power, I don’t know why. All those people searching and me knowing the answer. When I drove on I decided definitely I’d say nothing to her.

As it happened, the first thing she asked me about when I got back was newspapers. Was there anything about her? I said I hadn’t looked and I wasn’t going to look. I said I wasn’t interested in the papers, all they printed was a lot of tripe. She didn’t insist.

I never let her see papers. I never let her have a radio or television. It happened one day before ever she came I was reading a book called Secrets of the Gestapo—all about the tortures and so on they had to do in the war, and how one of the first things to put up with if you were a prisoner was the not knowing what was going on outside the prison. I mean they didn’t let the prisoners know anything, they didn’t even let them talk to each other, so they were cut off from their old world. And that broke them down. Of course, I didn’t want to break her down as the Gestapo wanted to break their prisoners down. But I thought it would be better if she was cut off from the outside world, she’d have to think about me more. So in spite of many attempts on her part to make me get her the papers and a radio I wouldn’t ever let her have them. The first days I didn’t want her to read about all the police were doing, and so on, because it would have only upset her. It was almost a kindness, as you might say.

That night I cooked her a supper of fresh frozen peas and frozen chicken in white sauce and she ate it and seemed to like it. After, I said, can I stay a bit?

“If you want,” she said. She was sitting on the bed, with the blanket folded at her back like a cushion, against the wall, her feet folded under her. For a time she just smoked and looked at one of the art picture books I’d bought her.

“Do you know anything about art?” she asked.

Nothing you’d call knowledge.

“I knew you didn’t. You wouldn’t imprison an innocent person if you did.”

I don’t see the connection, I said.

She closed the book. “Tell me about yourself. Tell me what you do in your free time.”

I’m an entomologist. I collect butterflies.

“Of course,” she said. “I remember they said so in the paper. Now you’ve collected me.”

She seemed to think it was funny, so I said, in a manner of speaking.

“No, not in a manner of speaking. Literally. You’ve pinned me in this little room and you can come and gloat over me.”

I don’t think of it like that at all.

“Do you know I’m a Buddhist? I hate anything that takes life. Even insects’ lives.”

You ate the chicken, I said. I caught her that time.

“But I despise myself. If I was a better person I’d be a vegetarian.”

I said, if you asked me to stop collecting butterflies, I’d do it. I’d do anything you asked me.

“Except let me fly away.”

I’d rather not talk about that. It doesn’t get us anywhere.

“Anyway, I couldn’t respect anyone, and especially a man, who did things just to please me. I’d want him to do them because he believed they were right.” All the time she used to get at me, you’d think we were talking about something quite innocent, and suddenly she’d be digging at me. I didn’t speak.

“How long shall I be here?”

I don’t know, I said. It depends.

“On what?”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

“On my falling in love with you?”

It was like nagging.

“Because if it does, I shall be here until I die.”

I didn’t answer that.

“Go away,” she said. “Go away and think it over.”