The Collector

How I hate ignorance! Caliban’s ignorance, my ignorance, the world’s ignorance! Oh, I could learn and learn and learn and learn. I could cry, I want to learn so much.

Gagged and bound.

I’ll put this to bed where it lives under the mattress. Then I’ll pray to God for learning.

October 22nd

A fortnight today. I have marked the days on the side of the screen, like Robinson Crusoe.

I feel depressed. Sleepless. I must, must, must escape.

I’m getting so pale. I feel ill, weak, all the time.

This terrible silence.

He’s so without mercy. So incomprehensible. What does he want? What is to happen?

He must see I’m getting ill.

I told him this evening that I must have some daylight. I made him look at me and see how pale I am.

Tomorrow, tomorrow. He never says no outright.

Today I’ve been thinking he could keep me here forever. It wouldn’t be very long, because I’d die. It’s absurd, it’s diabolical—but there is no way of escape. I’ve been trying to find loose stones again. I could dig a tunnel round the door. I could dig a tunnel right out. But it would have to be at least twenty feet long. All the earth. Being trapped inside it. I could never do it. I’d rather die. So it must be a tunnel round the door. But to do that I must have time. I must be sure he is away for at least six hours. Three for the tunnel, two to break through the outer door. I feel it is my best chance, I mustn’t waste it, spoil it through lack of preparation.

I can’t sleep.

I must do something.

I’m going to write about the first time I met G.P.

Caroline said, oh, this is Miranda. My niece. And went on telling him odiously about me (one Saturday morning shopping in the Village) and I didn’t know where to look, al-though I’d been wanting to meet him. She’d talked about him before.

At once I liked the way he treated her, coolly, not trying to hide he was bored. Not giving way before her, like everyone else. She talked about him all the way home. I knew she was shocked by him, although she wouldn’t admit it. The two broken marriages and then the obvious fact that he didn’t think much of her. So that I wanted to defend him from the beginning.

Then meeting him walking on the Heath. Having wanted to meet him again, and being ashamed again.

The way he walked. Very self-contained, not loosely. Such a nice old pilot-coat. He said hardly anything, I knew he really didn’t want to be with us (with Caroline) but he’d caught us up; he can’t have spotted from behind who we were, he was obviously going the same way. And perhaps (I’m being vain) it was something that happened when Caroline was going on in her silly woman-of-advanced-ideas way—just a look between us. I knew he was irritated and he knew I was ashamed. So he went round Kenwood with us and Caroline showed off.

Until she said in front of the Rembrandt, don’t you think he got the teeniest bit bored halfway through—I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel. You know? And she gave him her stupid listen-to-me laugh.

I was looking at him and his face suddenly went minutely stiff, as if he’d been caught off guard. It wasn’t done for me to see, it was the minutest change in the set of his mouth. He just gave her one look. Almost amused. But his voice wasn’t. It was icy cold.

I must go now. Goodbye. The goodbye was for me. It wrote me off. Or it said—so you can put up with this? I mean (looking back on it) he seemed to be teaching me a lesson. I had to choose. Caroline’s way, or his.

And he was gone, we didn’t even answer, and Caroline was looking after him, and shrugging and looking at me and saying, well, really.

I watched him go out, his hands in his pockets. I was red. Caroline was furious, trying to slide out of it. (“He’s always like that, he does it deliberately.”) Sneering at his painting all the way home (“second-rate Paul Nash"—ridiculously unfair). And me feeling so angry with her, and sorry for her at the same time. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t be sorry for her, but I couldn’t tell her he was right.

Between them Caroline and M have every quality I hate in other women. I had a sort of despair for days afterwards, thinking how much of their rotten, pretentious blood I must have in me. Of course, there are times when I like Caroline. Her briskness. Her enthusiasm. Her kindness. And even all the pretentiousness that’s so horrid next to the real thing—well, it’s better than nothing. I used to think the world of her when she came to stay. I used to love staying with her. She backed me up when there was the great family war about my future. All that till I lived with her and saw through her. Grew up. (I’m being a Hard Young Woman.)

Then a week later I ran into the lift at the Tube and he was the only other person there. I said hallo, too brightly. Went red again. He just nodded as if he didn’t want to speak, and then at the bottom (it was vanity, I couldn’t bear to be'lumped with Caroline) I said, I’m sorry my aunt said that at Kenwood.