The Collector

by John Fowles

  It was the music.

  The Goldberg Variations.

  There was one towards the end that was very slow, very simple, very sad, but so beautiful beyond words or drawing or anything but music, beautiful there in the moonlight. Moon-music, so silvery, so far, so noble.

  The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.

  Accepting the sadness. Knowing that to pretend it was all gay was treachery. Treachery to everyone sad at that moment, everyone ever sad, treachery to such music, such truth.

  In all the fuss and anxiety and the shoddiness and the business of London, making a career, getting pashes, art, learning, grabbing frantically at experience, suddenly this silent silver room full of that music.

  Like lying on one’s back as we did in Spain when we slept out looking up between the fig-branches into the star-corridors, the great seas and oceans of stars. Knowing what it was to be in a universe.

  I cried. In silence.

  At the end he said, now can I go to bed? Gently, making fun of me a little bit, bringing me back to earth. And I went. I don’t think we said anything. I can’t remember. He had his little dry smile, he could see I was moved.

  His perfect tact.

  I would have gone to bed with him that night. If he had asked. If he had come and kissed me.

  Not for his sake, but for being alive’s.

  November 1st

  A new month, and new luck. The tunnel idea keeps nagging at me, but the difficulty till now has been something to dig the concrete out with. Then yesterday as I was doing my prison-exercise in the outer cellar I saw a nail. A big old one, down against the wall in the far corner. I dropped my handkerchief so that I could get a closer look. I couldn’t pick it up, he watches me so closely. And it’s awkward with bound hands. Then today, when I was by the nail (he always sits on the steps up), I said (I did it on purpose) run and get me a cigarette. They’re on the chair by the door. Of course he wouldn’t. He said, what’s the game?

  I’ll stay here, I won’t move.

  Why don’t you get them yourself?

  Because sometimes I like to remember the days when men were nice to me. That’s all.

  I didn’t think it would work. But it did. He suddenly decided that there wasn’t anything I could possibly do, nothing I could pick up. (He locks things away in a drawer when I come out here.) So he went through the door. Only a second. But I stooped like lightning and got the nail up and into my skirt pocket—specially put on—and I was standing exactly as he left me when he jumped back. So I got my nail. And made him think he could trust me. Two birds with one stone.

  Nothing. But it seems a tremendous victory.

  I’ve started putting my plan into effect. For days I’ve been telling Caliban that I don’t see why D and M and everyone else should be left in the dark about whether I still exist. At least he could tell them I’m alive and all right. Tonight after supper I told him he could buy paper from Woolworth’s and use gloves and so on. He tried to wriggle out of it, as usual. But I kept at him. Every objection I squashed. And in the end I felt he really was beginning to think he might do it for me.

  I told him he could post the letter in London, to put the police off the track. And that I wanted all sorts of things from London. I’ve got to get him away from here for at least three or four hours. Because of the burglar alarms. And then I’m going to try my tunnel. What I’ve been thinking is that as the walls of this cellar (and the outer one) are stones—not stone—then behind the stones there must be earth. All I have to do is to get through the skin of stones and then I shall be in soft earth (I imagine).

  Perhaps it’s all wild. But I’m in a fever to try it.

  The Nielsen woman.

  I’d met her twice more at G.P.’s, when there were other people there—one was her husband, a Dane, some kind of importer. He spoke perfect English, so perfect it sounded wrong. Affected.

  I met her one day when she was coming out of the hairdresser’s and I’d been in to make an appointment for Caroline. She had on that special queasy-bright look women like her put on for girls of my age. What Minny calls welcome-to-the-tribe-of-women. It means they’re going to treat you like a grown-up, but they don’t really think you are and anyhow they’re jealous of you.

  She would take me for coffee. I was silly, I should have lied. It was all rhubarb, about me, about her daughter, about art. She knows people and tried to dazzle me with names. But it’s what people feel about art that I respect. Not what or who they know.

  I know she can’t be a lesbian, but she clings like that to one’s words. Things in her eyes she doesn’t dare tell you. But wants you to ask her to.

  You don’t know what’s gone on and what still goes on between G.P. and me, she seemed to say. I dare you to ask me.

  She talked on and on about Charlotte Street in the late ‘thirties and the war. Dylan Thomas. G.P.

  He likes you, she said.

  I know, I answered.

  But it was a shock. Both that she should know (had he told her?) and that she wanted to discuss it. I know she did.

  He’s always fallen for the really pretty ones, she said.

  She wanted terribly to discuss it.

  Then it was her daughter.

  She said, she’s sixteen now. I just can’t get across to her. Sometimes when I talk to her I feel like an animal in a zoo. She just stands outside and watches me.

  I knew she’d said it before. Or read it somewhere. You can always tell.

  They’re all the same, women like her. It’s not the teenagers and daughters who are different. We haven’t changed, we’re just young. It’s the silly new middle-aged people who’ve got to be young who’ve changed. This desperate silly trying to stay with us. They can’t be with us. We don’t want them to be with us. We don’t want them to wear our clothes-styles and use our language and have our interests. They imitate us so badly that we can’t respect them.

  But it made me feel, that meeting with her, that G.P. did love me (want me). That there’s a deep bond between us—his loving me in his way, my liking him very much (even loving him, but not sexually) in my way—a feeling that we’re groping towards a compromise. A sort of fog of unsolved desire and sadness between us. Something other people (like the N woman) couldn’t ever understand.

  Two people in a desert, trying to find both themselves and an oasis where they can live together.

  I’ve begun to think more and more like this—it is terribly cruel of fate to have put these twenty years between us. Why couldn’t he be my age, or me his? So the age thing is no longer the all-important factor that puts love right out of the question but a sort of cruel wall fate has built between us. I don’t think any more, the wall is between us, I think, the wall keeps us apart.

  November 2nd

  He produced the paper after supper, and dictated an absurd letter that I had to write out.

  Then the trouble started. I had prepared a little note, written in my smallest writing, and I slipped it into the envelope when he wasn’t looking. It was very small, and in the best spy stories wouldn’t have been noticed.

  He did.

  It upset him. Made him see things in the cold light of reality. But he was genuinely shocked that I should be frightened. He can’t imagine himself killing or raping me, and that is something.

  I let him have his pet, but in the end I went and tried to be nice to him (because I knew I must get him to send that letter). It was a job. I’ve never known him in such a huff.

  Wouldn’t he call it a day, and let me go home?

  No.

  What did he want to do with me then? Take me to bed?

  He gave me such a look, as if I was being really disgusting.

  T
hen I had an inspiration. I acted a little charade. His oriental slave. He likes me to play the fool. The stupidest things I do he calls witty. He has even got in the habit of joining in, stumbling after me (not that I’m very dazzling) like a giraffe.

  So I got him to let me write another letter. He looked in the envelope again.

  Then I talked him into going to London, as my plan requires. I gave him a ridiculous list of things (most of them I don’t want, but it’ll keep him busy) to buy. I told him it was impossible to trace a letter posted in London. So he finally agreed. He likes me to wheedle, the brute.

  One request—no, I don’t ask him for things, I order them. I commanded him to try and buy a George Paston. I gave him a list of galleries where he might find things by G.P. I even tried to get him to go to the studio.

  But as soon as he heard it was in Hampstead, he smelt a rat. He wanted to know if I knew this George Paston. I said, no, well, just by name. But it didn’t sound very convincing; and I was afraid he wouldn’t buy any of his pictures anywhere. So I said, he’s a casual friend of mine, he’s quite old, but he’s a very good painter, and he badly needs money and I should very much like some of his pictures. We could hang them on the walls. If you bought straight from him we wouldn’t be paying money to the galleries, but I can see you’re frightened to go, I said, so there’s an end to it. Of course he didn’t fall for that.

  He wanted to know if G.P. was one of these paintpot-at-the-wall chaps. I just gave him a look.

  C. I was only joking.

  M. Then don’t.

  After a bit, he said, he would want to know where I came from and all.

  I told him what he could say, and he said he’d think about it. Which is Calibanese for “no.” It was too much to expect; and there probably won’t be anything in any of the galleries.

  And I don’t worry because I’m not going to be here this time tomorrow. I’m going to escape.

  He’ll go off after breakfast. He’s going to leave my lunch. So I shall have four or five hours (unless he cheats and doesn’t get all I’ve asked, but he’s never failed before).

  I felt sorry for Caliban this evening. He will suffer when I am gone. There will be nothing left. He’ll be alone with all his sex neurosis and his class neurosis and his uselessness and his emptiness. He’s asked for it. I’m not really sorry. But I’m not absolutely unsorry.

  November 4th

  I couldn’t write yesterday. Too fed up.

  I was so stupid. I got him away all yesterday. I had hours to escape. But I never really thought of the problems. I saw myself scooping out handfuls of soft loamy earth. The nail was useless, it wouldn’t dig the cement properly. I thought it would crumble away. It was terribly hard. I took hours to get one stone out. There wasn’t earth behind, but another stone, a bigger one, chalk, and I couldn’t even find where its edge was. I got another stone out of the wall, but it didn’t help. There was the same huge stone behind. I began to get desperate, I saw the tunnel was no good. I hit violently at the door, I tried to force it with the nail, and managed to hurt my hand. That’s all. All I had at the end was a sore hand and broken fingernails.

  I’m just not strong enough, without tools. Even with tools.

  In the end I put the stones back and powdered (as well as I could) the cement and mixed it with water and talcum powder to camouflage the hole. It’s typical of the states I get in here—I suddenly told myself that the digging would have to be done over a number of days, the only stupid thing was to expect to do it all in one.

  So I spent a long time trying to hide the place.

  But it was no good, little bits fell out, and I’d started in the most obvious place, where he’s bound to spot it.

  So I gave up. I suddenly decided it was all petty, stupid, useless. Like a bad drawing. Unrescuable.

  When he came at last, he saw it at once. He always sniffs round as soon as he enters. Then he started to see how far I had gone. I sat on the bed and watched him. In the end I threw the nail at him.

  He’s cemented the stones back. He says it’s solid chalk behind all the way round.

  I wouldn’t speak to him all the evening, or look at the things he’d bought, even though I could see one of them was a picture-frame.

  I took a sleeping-pill and went to bed straight after supper.

  Then, this morning (I woke up early) before he came down, I decided to pass it off as something unimportant. To be normal.

  Not to give in.

  I unpacked all the things he’d bought. First of all, there was G.P.’s picture. It is a drawing of a girl (young woman), a nude, not like anything else of his I have seen, and I think it must be something he did a long time ago. It is his. It has his simplicity of line, hatred of fussiness, of Topolskitis. She’s half-turned away, hanging up or taking down a dress from a hook. A pretty face? It’s difficult to say. Rather a heavy Maillol body. It’s not worth dozens of things he’s done since.

  But real.

  I kissed it when I unwrapped it. I’ve been looking at some of the lines not as lines, but as things he has touched. All morning. Now.

  Not love. Humanity.

  Caliban was surprised that I seemed so positively gay when he came in. I thanked him for all he had bought. I said, you can’t be a proper prisoner if you don’t try to escape and now don’t let’s talk about it—agreed?

  He said that he’d telephoned every gallery I gave him the name of. There was only the one thing.

  Thank you very much, I said. May I keep it down here? And when I go, I’ll give it to you. (I shan’t—he said he’d rather have a drawing of mine, in any case.)

  I asked him if he had posted the letter. He said he had, but I saw he was going red. I told him I believed him and that it would be such a dirty trick not to post the letter that I was sure he must have posted it.

  I feel almost certain he funked it, as he funked the cheque. It would be just like him. But nothing I say will make him post it. So I’ve decided that I will suppose he has posted it.

  Midnight. I had to stop. He came down.

  We’ve been playing the records he bought.

  Bartok’s Music for Percussion and Celesta.

  The loveliest.

  It made me think of Collioure last summer. The day we went, all four of us with the French students, up through the ilexes to the tower. The ilexes. An absolutely new colour, amazing chestnut, rufous, burning, bleeding, where they had cut away the cork. The cicadas. The wild azure sea through the stems and the heat and the smell of everything burnt in it. Piers and I and everyone except Minny got a bit tipsy. Sleeping in the shade, waking up staring through the leaves at the cobalt blue sky, thinking how impossible things were to paint, how can some blue pigment ever mean the living blue light of the sky. I suddenly felt I didn’t want to paint, painting was just showing off, the thing was to experience and experience for ever more.

  The beautiful clean sun on the blood-red stems.

  And coming back I had a long talk with the nice shy boy, Jean-Louis. His bad English and my bad French, yet we understood each other. Terribly timid he was. Frightened of Piers. Jealous of him. Jealous of his throwing an arm round me, the silly lout Piers is. And when I discovered he was going to be a priest.

  Piers was so crude afterwards. That stupid clumsy frightened-of-being-soft English male cruelty to the truth. He couldn’t see that of course poor Jean-Louis liked me, of course he was sexually attracted, but there was this other thing, it wasn’t really shyness, it was a determination to try to be a priest and to live in the world. A simply colossal effort of coming to terms with oneself. Like destroying all the paintings one’s ever done and making a new start. Only he had to do it every day. Every time he saw a girl he liked. And all Piers could say was: I bet he’s having dirty dreams about you.

  So ghastly, that arrogance, that insensitivity, of boys who’ve been to public schools. Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves eve
rything, as if to hate something means it can’t have affected you. I always know when he doesn’t understand something. He gets cynical, he says something shocking.

  When I told G.P. about it much later, he just said, poor frog, he was probably on his knees praying to forget you.

  Watching Piers throw stones out to sea—where was it? — somewhere near Valencia. So beautiful, like a young god, all golden-brown, with his dark hair. His swimming-slip. And Minny said (she was lying beside me, oh, it’s so clear) she said, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Piers was dumb.

  And then she said, could you go to bed with him?

  I said, no. Then, I don’t know.

  Piers came up then and wanted to know what she was smiling about.

  Nanda’s just told me a secret, she said. About you.

  Piers made some feeble joke and went off to get the lunch from the car with Peter.

  What’s the secret, I wanted to know.

  Bodies beat minds, she said.

  Clever Carmen Grey always knows what to say.

  I knew you’d say that, she said. She was doodling in the sand and I was on my tummy watching her. She said, what I mean is he’s so terribly good-looking, one could forget he’s so stupid. You might think, I could marry him and teach him. Couldn’t you? And you know you couldn’t. Or you could go to bed with him just for fun and one day you’d suddenly find you were in love with his body and you couldn’t live without it and you’d be stuck with his rotten mind for ever and ever.

  Then she said, doesn’t it terrify you?

  Not more than so many other things.

  I’m serious. If you married him I’d never speak to you again.

  And she was serious. That very quick grey shy look she puts on, like a little lance. I got up and kissed her on the way up and went to meet the boys. And she sat there, still looking down at the sand.