The Collector

He gave me a long look. Then he changed, he got out the chess-board and we played chess and he let me beat him. He wouldn’t admit it, but I am sure he did. We hardly said anything, we seemed to communicate through the chessmen, there was something very symbolic about my winning. That he wished me to feel. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know whether it was that he wanted me to see my “virtue” triumphed over his “vice,” or something subtler, that sometimes losing is winning.

The next time I went he gave me a drawing he had done. It was of the vriki and the two cups on the bench. Beautifully drawn, absolutely simple, absolutely without fuss or nervousness, absolutely free of that clever art-student look the drawings of simple objects I do have.

Just the two cups and the little copper vriki and his hand. Or a hand. Lying by one of the cups, like a plaster cast. On the back he wrote, Après, and the date. And then, pour “une” princesse lointaine. The “une” was very heavily underlined.

I wanted to go on about Toinette. But I’m too tired. I want to smoke when I write, and it makes the air so stuffy.

October 29th

(Morning.) He’s gone into? Lewes.

Toinette.

It was a month after the evening of the record. I ought to have guessed, she had been purring over me for days, giving me arch looks. I thought it was something to do with Piers. And then one evening I rang the bell and then I noticed the lock was up, so I pushed the door open and looked up the stairs, at the same time as Toinette looked down round the door. And we were looking at each other. After a moment she came out on the landing and she was dressing. She didn’t say anything, she just gestured me to come up and into the studio and what was worst, I was red, and she was not. She was just amused.

Don’t look so shocked, she said. He’ll be back in a minute. He’s just gone out for . . . but I never heard what it was, because I went.

I’ve never really analyzed why I was so angry and so shocked and so hurt. Donald, Piers, David, everyone knows she lives in London as she lived in Stockholm—she’s told me herself, they’ve told me. And G.P. had told me what he was like.

It was not just jealousy. It was that someone like G.P. could be so close to someone like her—someone so real and someone so shallow, so phoney, so loose. But why should he have considered me at all? There’s not a single reason.

He’s twenty-one years older than I am. Nine years younger than D.

For days afterwards it wasn’t G.P. I was disgusted with, but myself. At my narrow-mindedness. I forced myself to meet, to listen to Toinette. She didn’t crow at all. I think that must have been G.P.’s doing. He ordered her not to.

She went back the next day. She said it was to say she was sorry. And (her words), “It just happened.”

I was so jealous. They made me feel older than they were. They were like naughty children. Happy-with-a-secret. Then that I was frigid. I couldn’t bear to see G.P. In the end, it must have been a week later, he rang me up again one evening at Caroline’s. He didn’t sound guilty. I said I was too busy to see him. I wouldn’t go round that evening, no. If he had pressed, I would have refused. But he seemed to be about to ring off, and I said I’d go round the next day. I so wanted him to know I was hurt. You can’t be hurt over a telephone.

Caroline said, I think you’re seeing too much of him.

I said, he’s having an affaire with that Swedish girl.

We even had a talk about it. I was very fair. I defended him. But in bed I lay and accused him to myself. For hours.

The first thing he said the next day was (no pretending)—has she been a bitch to you?

I said, no. Not at all. Then, as if I didn’t care, why should she?

He smiled. I know what you’re feeling, he seemed to say. It made me want to slap his face. I couldn’t look as if I didn’t care, which made it worse.

He said, men are vile.

I said, the vilest thing about them is that they can say that with a smile on their faces.

That is true, he said. And there was silence. I wished I hadn’t come, I wished I’d cut him out of my life. I looked at the bedroom door. It was ajar, I could see the end of the bed.

I said, I’m not able to put life in compartments yet. That’s all.

Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I’ve more knowledge of life than you, I’ve lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what’s trivial and what’s important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don’t want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I’m not a good man. Perhaps morally I’m younger even than you are. Can you understand that?