The Collector

“It’s like those wild duck. It’s suburban, it’s stale, it’s dead, it’s . . . oh, everything square that ever was. You know?”

I think you’d better be mother, I said.

Then it was strange, she smiled just like she was going to laugh, and then she stopped and turned and went into her room, where I followed with the tray. She poured out the tea, but something had made her angry, you could see. She wouldn’t look at me.

I didn’t mean to offend you, I said.

“I suddenly thought of my family. They won’t be laughing over jolly cups of tea this evening.”

Four weeks, I said.

“Don’t remind me of it!”

She was just like a woman. Unpredictable. Smiling one minute and spiteful the next.

She said, “You’re loathsome. And you make me loathsome.”

It won’t be long.

Then she said something I’ve never heard a woman say before. It really shocked me.

I said, I don’t like words like that. It’s disgusting.

Then she said it again, really screamed it at me.

I couldn’t follow all her moods sometimes.

She was all right the next morning, though she did not apologize. Also, the two vases in her room were broken on the steps when I went in. As always, she was up and waiting for me when I came in with her breakfast.

Well, the first thing she wanted to know was whether I was going to allow her to see daylight. I told her it was raining.

“Why couldn’t I go out into the other cellar and walk up and down? I want exercise.”

We had a good old argument about that. In the end the arrangement was if she wanted to walk there in daytime she would have to have the gag on. I couldn’t risk someone chancing to be round the back—not that it was likely, of course, the front gate and garage gate were locked always. But at night just the hands would do. I said I wouldn’t promise more than one bath a week. And nothing about daylight. I thought for a moment she would go into one of her sulks again, but she began to understand about that time sulks didn’t get her anywhere, so she accepted my rules.

Perhaps I was overstrict, I erred on the strict side. But you had to be careful. For instance, at week-ends there was a lot more traffic about. Fine Sundays there were cars passing every five minutes. Often they would slow as they passed Fosters, some would reverse back to have another look, some even had the cheek to push their cameras through the front gate and take photos. So on week-ends I never let her leave her room.

One day I was just driving out to go down to Lewes and a man in a car stopped me. Was I the owner? He was one of those ever-so-cultured types with a plum in their throat. The I’m-a-friend-of-the-boss type. He talked a lot of stuff about the house and how he was writing some article for a magazine and would I let him look round and take photographs, he especially wanted to have a look at the priest’s chapel.

There’s no chapel here, I said.

But my dear man, that’s fantastic, he said, it’s mentioned in the County History. In dozens of books.

You mean that old place in the cellar, I said, as if I had just cottoned on. That’s blocked up. Been bricked in.

But this is a scheduled building. You can’t do things like that.

I said, well it’s still there. It’s just you can’t see anything. It was done before I came.

Then he wanted to look indoors. I said I was in a hurry, I couldn’t wait. He’d come back—"Just tell me a day.” I wouldn’t have it. I said I got a lot of requests. He went on nosing, he even started threatening me with an order to view, the Ancient Monuments people (whoever they are) would back him up, really offensive, and slimy at the same time. In the end he just drove off. It was all bluff on his part, but that was the sort of thing I had to think about.

I took the photos that evening. Just ordinary, of her sitting reading. They came out quite well.

One day about then she did a picture of me, like returned the compliment. I had to sit in a chair and look at the corner of the room. After half an hour she tore up the drawing before I could stop her. (She often tore up. Artistic temperament, I suppose.)

I’d have liked it, I said. But she didn’t even reply to that, she just said, don’t move.

From time to time she talked. Mostly personal remarks.

“You’re very difficult to get. You’re so featureless. Everything’s nondescript. I’m thinking of you as an object, not as a person.”

Later she said, “You’re not ugly, but your face has all sorts of ugly habits. Your underlip is worst. It betrays you.” I looked in the mirror upstairs, but I couldn’t see what she meant.

Sometimes she’d come out of the blue with funny questions.

“Do you believe in God?” was one.

Not much, I answered.

“It must be yes or no.”

I don’t think about it. Don’t see that it matters.

“You’re the one imprisoned in a cellar,” she said.

Do you believe, I asked.

“Of course I do. I’m a human being.”

She said, stop talking, when I was going on.

She complained about the light. “It’s this artificial light. I can never draw by it. It lies.”

I knew what she was getting at, so I kept my mouth shut.