The Collector

I’ve put a message down the place. In a little plastic bottle with a yard of red ribbon round it. I hope it will become unrolled and someone may see it. Somewhere. Sometime. They ought to find the house easily enough. He was silly to tell me about the date over the door. I had to end by saying THIS IS NOT A HOAX. Terribly difficult not to make it sound like a silly joke. And I said anyone ringing up D and telling him would get £25. I’m going to launch a bottle on the sea (hmm) every time I have a bath.

He’s taken down all the brass gewgaws on the landing and stairs. And the horrible viridian-orange-magenta paintings of Majorcan fishing-villages. The poor place sighs with relief.

I like being upstairs. It’s nearer freedom. Everything’s locked. All the windows in the front of the house have indoor shutters. The others are padlocked. (Two cars passed tonight, but it must be a very unimportant road.)

I’ve also started to educate him. Tonight in the lounge (my hands tied, of course) we went through a book of paintings. No mind of his own. I don’t think he listens half the time.

He’s thinking about sitting near me and straining to be near without touching. I don’t know if it’s sex, or fear that I’m up to some trick.

If he does think about the pictures, he accepts everything I say. If I said Michelangelo’s David was a frying-pan he’d say—"I see.”

Such people. I must have stood next to them in the Tube, passed them in the street, of course I’ve overheard them and I knew they existed. But never really believed they exist. So totally blind. It never seemed possible.

Dialogue. He was sitting still looking at the book with an Art-Is-Wonderful air about him (for my benefit, not because he believes it, of course).

M. Do you know what’s really odd about this house? There aren’t any books. Except what you’ve bought for me.

C. Some upstairs.

M. About butterflies.

C. Others.

M. A few measly detective novels. Don’t you ever read proper books—real books? (Silence.) Books about important things by people who really feel about life. Not just paperbacks to kill time on a train journey. You know, books?

C. Light novels are more my line. (He’s like one of those boxers. You wish he’d lie down and be knocked out.)

M. You can jolly well read The Catcher in the Rye. I’ve almost finished it. Do you know I’ve read it twice and I’m five years younger than you are?

C. I’ll read it.

M. It’s not a punishment.

C. I looked at it before I brought it down.

M. And you didn’t like it.

C. I’ll try it.

M. You make me sick.

Silence then. I felt unreal, as if it was a play and I couldn’t remember who I was in it.

And I asked him earlier today why he collected butterflies.

C. You get a nicer class of people.

M. You can’t collect them just because of that.

C. It was a teacher I had. When I was a kid. He showed me how. He collected. Didn’t know much. Still set the old way. (Something to do with the angle of the wings. The modern way is to have them at right angles.) And my uncle. He was interested in nature. He always helped.

M. He sounds nice.

C. People interested in nature always are nice. You take what we call the Bug Section. That’s the Entomological Section of the Natural History Society back home. They treat you for what you are. Don’t look down their noses at you. None of that.

M. They’re not always nice. (But he didn’t get it.)

C. You get the snob ones. But they’re mostly like I say. A nicer class of people than what you . . . what I meet . . . met in the ordinary way.

M. Didn’t your friends despise you? Didn’t they think it was sissy?

C. I didn’t have any friends. They were just people I worked with. (After a bit he said, they had their silly jokes.)

M. Such as?

C. Just silly jokes.

I didn’t go on. I have an irresistible desire sometimes to get to the bottom of him, to drag things he won’t talk about out of him. But it’s bad. It sounds as if I care about him and his miserable, wet, unwithit life.

When you use words. The gaps. The way Caliban sits, a certain bowed-and-upright posture—why? Embarrassment? To spring at me if I run for it? I can draw it. I can draw his face and his expressions, but words are all so used, they’ve been used about so many other things and people. I write “he smiled.” What does that mean? No more than a kindergarten poster painting of a turnip with a moon-mouth smile. Yet if I draw the smile . . .

Words are so crude, so terribly primitive compared to drawing, painting, sculpture. “I sat on my bed and he sat by the door and we talked and I tried to persuade him to use his money to educate himself and he said he would but I didn’t feel convinced.” Like a messy daub.

Like trying to draw with a broken lead.

All this is my own thinking.

I need to see G.P. He’d tell me the names of ten books where it’s all said much better.