The Collector

Then again—it may not have been that first morning she drew me, I can’t remember which day it was—she suddenly came out with, “You’re lucky having no parents. Mine have only kept together because of my sister and me.”

How do you know, I said.

“Because my mother’s told me,” she said. “And my father. My mother’s a bitch. A nasty ambitious middle-class bitch. She drinks.”

I heard, I said.

“I could never have friends to stay.”

I’m sorry, I said. She gave me a sharp look, but I wasn’t being sarcastic. I told her about my father drinking, and my mother.

“My father’s weak, though I love him very much. Do you know what he said to me one day? He said, I don’t know how two such bad parents can have produced two such good daughters. He was thinking of my sister, really. She’s the really clever one.”

You’re the really clever one. You won a big scholarship.

“I’m a good draughtsman,” she said. “I might become a very clever artist, but I shan’t ever be a great one. At least I don’t think so.”

You can’t tell, I said.

“I’m not egocentric enough. I’m a woman. I have to lean on something.” I don’t know why but she suddenly changed the subject and said, “Are you a queer?”

Certainly not, I said. I blushed, of course.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of good men are.” Then she said, “You want to lean on me. I can feel it. I expect it’s your mother. You’re looking for your mother.”

I don’t believe in all that stuff, I said.

“We’d never be any good together. We both want to lean.”

You could lean on me financially, I said.

“And you on me for everything else? God forbid.”

Then, here, she said and held out the drawing. It was really good, it really amazed me, the likeness. It seemed to make me more dignified, better-looking than I really was.

Would you consider selling this, I asked?

“I hadn’t, but I will. Two hundred guineas?”

All right, I said.

She gave me another sharp look.

“You’d give me two hundred guineas for that?”

Yes, I said. Because you did it.

“Give it to me.” I handed it back and before I knew what, she was tearing it across.

Please don’t, I said. She stopped, but it was torn half across.

“But it’s bad, bad, bad.” Then suddenly she sort of threw it at me. “Here you are. Put it in a drawer with the butterflies.”

The next time I was in Lewes I bought her some more records, all I could find by Mozart, because she liked him, it seemed.

Another day she drew a bowl of fruit. She drew them about ten times, and then she pinned them all up on the screen and asked me to pick the best. I said they were all beautiful but she insisted so I plumped for one.

“That’s the worst,” she said. “That’s a clever little art student’s picture.” She said, “One of them is good. I know it is good. It is worth all the rest a hundred times over. If you can pick it in three guesses you can have it for nothing when I go. If I go. If you don’t, you must give me ten guineas for it.”

Well, ignoring her dig I had three guesses, they were all wrong. The one that was so good only looked half-finished to me, you could hardly tell what the fruit were and it was all lop-sided.

“There I’m just on the threshold of saying something about the fruit. I don’t actually say it, but you get the idea that I might. Do you feel that?”

I said I didn’t actually.

She went and got a book of pictures by Cezanne.

“There,” she said, pointing to a coloured one of a plate of apples. “He’s not only saying everything there is about the apples, but everything about all apples and all form and colour.”

I take your word for it, I said. All your pictures are nice, I said.

She just looked at me.

“Ferdinand,” she said. “They should have called you Caliban.”

One day three or four after her first bath she was very restless. She walked up and down in the outer cellar after supper, sat on the bed, got up. I was looking at drawings she’d done that afternoon. All copies of pictures from the art-books, very clever, I thought, and very like.

Suddenly she said, “Couldn’t we go for a walk? On parole?”

But it’s wet, I said. And cold. It was the second week in October.

“I’m going mad cooped up in here. Couldn’t we just walk round the garden?”

She came right up close to me, a thing she usually avoided and held out her wrists. She’d taken to wearing her hair long, tied up with a dark blue ribbon that was one of the things she wrote down for me to buy. Her hair was always beautiful. I never saw more beautiful hair. Often I had an itch to touch it. Just to stroke it, to feel it. It gave me a chance when I put the gag on.