The Collector

by John Fowles

  It was the first time she’d given me a kind look. She was saying, trust me, plain as words. A little smile round her eyes, looking up at me. All eager.

  “You could. We could be friends. I could help you.”

  Looking up at me there.

  “It’s not too late.”

  I couldn’t say what I felt, I just had to leave her; she was really hurting me. So I closed the door and left her. I didn’t even say good night.

  No one will understand, they will think I was just after her for the obvious. Sometimes when I looked at the books before she came, it was what I thought, or I didn’t know. Only when she came it was all different, I didn’t think about the books or about her posing, things like that disgusted me, it was because I knew they would disgust her too. There was something so nice about her you had to be nice too, you could see she sort of expected it. I mean having her real made other things seem nasty. She was not like some woman you don’t respect so you don’t care what you do, you respected her and you had to be very careful.

  I didn’t sleep much that night, because I was shocked the way things had gone, my telling her so much the very first day and how she made me seem a fool. There were moments when I thought I’d have to go down and drive her back to London like she wanted. I could go abroad. But then I thought of her face and the way her pigtail hung down a bit sideways and twisted and how she stood and walked and her lovely clear eyes. I knew I couldn’t do it.

  After breakfast—that morning she ate a bit of cereal and had some coffee, when we didn’t speak at all—she was up and dressed, but the bed had been made differently from at first so she must have slept in it. Anyhow she stopped me when I was going out.

  “I’d like to talk with you.” I stopped.

  “Sit down,” she said. I sat down on the chair by the steps down.

  “Look, this is mad. If you love me in any real sense of the word love you can’t want to keep me here. You can see I’m miserable. The air, I can’t breathe at nights, I’ve woken up with a headache. I should die if you kept me here long.” She looked really concerned.

  It won’t be very long. I promise.

  She got up and stood by the chest of drawers, and stared at me.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  Clegg, I answered.

  “Your first name?”

  Ferdinand.

  She gave me a quick sharp look.

  “That’s not true,” she said. I remembered I had my wallet in my coat with my initials in gold I’d bought and I showed it. She wasn’t to know F stood for Frederick. I’ve always liked Ferdinand, it’s funny, even before I knew her. There’s something foreign and distinguished about it. Uncle Dick used to call me it sometimes, joking. Lord Ferdinand Clegg, Marquis of Bugs, he used to say.

  It’s just a coincidence, I said.

  “I suppose people call you Ferdie. Or Ferd.”

  Always Ferdinand.

  “Look, Ferdinand, I don’t know what you see in me. I don’t know why you’re in love with me. Perhaps I could fall in love with you somewhere else. I …” she didn’t seem to know what to say, which was unusual “… I do like gentle, kind men. But I couldn’t possibly fall in love with you in this room, I couldn’t fall in love with anyone here. Ever.”

  I answered, I just want to get to know you.

  All the time she was sitting on the chest of drawers, watching me to see what effect the things she said had. So I was suspicious. I knew it was a test.

  “But you can’t kidnap people just to get to know them!”

  I want to know you very much. I wouldn’t have a chance in London. I’m not clever and all that. Not your class. You wouldn’t be seen dead with me in London.

  “That’s not fair. I’m not a snob. I hate snobs. I don’t pre-judge people.”

  I’m not blaming you, I said.

  “I hate snobbism.” She was quite violent. She had a way of saying some words very strong, very emphatic. “Some of my best friends in London are—well, what some people call working class. In origin. We just don’t think about it.”

  Like Peter Catesby, I said. (That was the young man with the sports car’s name.)

  “Him! I haven’t seen him for months. He’s just a middle-class suburban oaf.”

  I could still see her climbing into his flashy M.G. I didn’t know whether to trust her.

  “I suppose it’s in all the papers.”

  I haven’t looked.

  “You might go to prison for years.”

  Be worth it. Be worth going for life, I said.

  “I promise, I swear that if you let me go I will not tell anyone. I’ll tell them all some story. I will arrange to meet you as often as you like, as often as I can when I’m not working. Nobody will ever know about this except us.”

  I can’t, I said. Not now. I felt like a cruel king, her appealing like she did.

  “If you let me go now I shall begin to admire you. I shall think, he had me at his mercy, but he was chivalrous, he behaved like a real gentleman.”

  I can’t, I said. Don’t ask. Please don’t ask.

  “I should think, someone like that must be worth knowing.” She sat perched there, watching me.

  I’ve got to go now, I said. I went out so fast I fell over the top step. She got off the drawers and stood looking up at me in the door with a strange expression.

  “Please,” she said. Very gently and nicely. It was difficult to resist.

  It was like not having a net and catching a specimen you wanted in your first and second fingers (I was always very clever at that), coming up slowly behind and you had it, but you had to nip the thorax, and it would be quivering there. It wasn’t easy like it was with a killing-bottle. And it was twice as difficult with her, because I didn’t want to kill her, that was the last thing I wanted.

  She often went on about how she hated class distinction, but she never took me in. It’s the way people speak that gives them away, not what they say. You only had to see her dainty ways to see how she was brought up. She wasn’t la-di-da, like many, but it was there all the same. You could see it when she got sarcastic and impatient with me because I couldn’t explain myself or I did things wrong. Stop thinking about class, she’d say. Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking about money.

  I don’t hold it against her, she probably said and did some of the shocking things she did to show me she wasn’t really refined, but she was. When she was angry she could get right up on her high horse and come it over me with the best of them.

  There was always class between us.

  I went into Lewes that morning. Partly I wanted to see the papers, I bought the lot. All of them had something. Some of the tripe papers had quite a lot, two had photographs. It was funny, reading the reports. There were things I didn’t know before.

  Longhaired blonde, art-student Miranda Grey, 20, who last year won a major scholarship to London’s top Slade School of Art, is missing. She lived in term-time at 29 Hamnet Rd., N.W.3, with her aunt, Miss C. Vanbrugh-Jones, who late yesterday night alerted the police.

  After class on Tuesday Miranda phoned to say she was going; to a cinema and would be home soon after eight.

  That was the last time she was seen.

  There was a big photo of her and beside it it said: Have You Seen This Girl?

  Another paper gave me a good laugh.

  Hampstead residents have been increasingly concerned in recent months about prowling “wolves” in cars. Piers Broughton, a fellow-student and close friend of Miranda, told me in the coffee-bar he often took Miranda to, that she seemed perfectly happy the day of her disappearance and had arranged to go to an exhibition with him only today. He said, “Miranda knows what London is like. She’s the last person to take a lift from a stranger or anything like that. I’m most terribly worried about all this.”

  A spokesman for the Slade School said, “She is one of our most promising second-year students.
We are sure that there is some quite harmless explanation for her disappearance. Artistic young people have their whims.”

  There the mystery rests.

  The police are asking anyone who saw Miranda on Tuesday evening, or who heard or noticed anything suspicious in the Hampstead area, to get in touch with them.

  They said what clothes she was wearing and so on and there was a photo. Another paper said the police were going to drag the ponds on Hampstead Heath. One talked about Piers Broughton and how he and she were unofficially engaged. I wondered if he was the beatnik I saw her with. Another said, “She is one of the most popular students, always willing to help.” They all said she was pretty. There were photos. If she was ugly it would all have been two lines on the back page.

  I sat in the van on the road verge on the way back and read all the papers said. It gave me a feeling of power, I don’t know why. All those people searching and me knowing the answer. When I drove on I decided definitely I’d say nothing to her.

  As it happened, the first thing she asked me about when I got back was newspapers. Was there anything about her? I said I hadn’t looked and I wasn’t going to look. I said I wasn’t interested in the papers, all they printed was a lot of tripe. She didn’t insist.

  I never let her see papers. I never let her have a radio or television. It happened one day before ever she came I was reading a book called Secrets of the Gestapo — all about the tortures and so on they had to do in the war, and how one of the first things to put up with if you were a prisoner was the not knowing what was going on outside the prison. I mean they didn’t let the prisoners know anything, they didn’t even let them talk to each other, so they were cut off from their old world. And that broke them down. Of course, I didn’t want to break her down as the Gestapo wanted to break their prisoners down. But I thought it would be better if she was cut off from the outside world, she’d have to think about me more. So in spite of many attempts on her part to make me get her the papers and a radio I wouldn’t ever let her have them. The first days I didn’t want her to read about all the police were doing, and so on, because it would have only upset her. It was almost a kindness, as you might say.

  That night I cooked her a supper of fresh frozen peas and frozen chicken in white sauce and she ate it and seemed to like it. After, I said, can I stay a bit?

  “If you want,” she said. She was sitting on the bed, with the blanket folded at her back like a cushion, against the wall, her feet folded under her. For a time she just smoked and looked at one of the art picture books I’d bought her.

  “Do you know anything about art?” she asked.

  Nothing you’d call knowledge.

  “I knew you didn’t. You wouldn’t imprison an innocent person if you did.”

  I don’t see the connection, I said.

  She closed the book. “Tell me about yourself. Tell me what you do in your free time.”

  I’m an entomologist. I collect butterflies.

  “Of course,” she said. “I remember they said so in the paper. Now you’ve collected me.”

  She seemed to think it was funny, so I said, in a manner of speaking.

  “No, not in a manner of speaking. Literally. You’ve pinned me in this little room and you can come and gloat over me.”

  I don’t think of it like that at all.

  “Do you know I’m a Buddhist? I hate anything that takes life. Even insects’ lives.”

  You ate the chicken, I said. I caught her that time.

  “But I despise myself. If I was a better person I’d be a vegetarian.”

  I said, if you asked me to stop collecting butterflies, I’d do it. I’d do anything you asked me.

  “Except let me fly away.”

  I’d rather not talk about that. It doesn’t get us anywhere.

  “Anyway, I couldn’t respect anyone, and especially a man, who did things just to please me. I’d want him to do them because he believed they were right.” All the time she used to get at me, you’d think we were talking about something quite innocent, and suddenly she’d be digging at me. I didn’t speak.

  “How long shall I be here?”

  I don’t know, I said. It depends.

  “On what?”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

  “On my falling in love with you?”

  It was like nagging.

  “Because if it does, I shall be here until I die.”

  I didn’t answer that.

  “Go away,” she said. “Go away and think it over.”

  The next morning she made the first attempt to escape. She didn’t catch me off guard, exactly, but it taught me a lesson. She had her breakfast and then she told me her bed was loose, it was the far back leg, right up in the corner. I thought it was going to collapse, she said, there’s a nut loose. Like a mutt I went to help her hold it and suddenly she gave me a heavy push, just as I was off balance, and ran past me. She was at the steps and up them like lightning. I had allowed for it, there was a safety hook holding the door back open and a wedge she was trying to kick away when I came after her. Well, she turned and ran, screaming help, help, help, and up the steps to the outer door, which was of course locked. She pulled at it and banged it and went screaming on, but I got her then. I hated doing it, but action was necessary. I got her round the waist and one hand over her mouth and dragged her down back. She lucked and struggled, but of course she was too small and I may not be Mr. Atlas but I am not a weakling either. In the end she went limp and I let her go. She stood a moment, then she suddenly jumped and hit me across the face. It didn’t really hurt but the shock of it was most nasty, coming when I least expected it and after I’d been so reasonable when others might have lost their heads. Then she went into the room slamming the door behind her. I felt like going in and having it out with her, but I knew she was angry. There was real hatred in her looks. So I bolted the door and put up the false door.

  The next thing was she wouldn’t talk. That next lunch she said not a word when I spoke to her and said I was ready to let bygones be bygones. She just gave me a big look of contempt. It was the same that evening. When I came to clear, she handed me the tray and turned away. She made it very plain she didn’t want me to stay. I thought she’d get over it, but the next day it was worse. Not only she didn’t speak, she didn’t eat.

  Please don’t do this, I said. It’s no good.

  But she wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t even look at me.

  The next day it was the same. She wouldn’t eat, she wouldn’t speak. I’d been waiting for her to wear some of the clothes I’d bought, but she kept on wearing the white blouse and the green tartan tunic. I began to get really worried, I didn’t know how long people could go without food, she seemed pale and weak to me. She spent all the time sitting against the wall on her bed, her back turned, looking so miserable I didn’t know what to do.

  The next day I took in coffee for breakfast and some nice toast and cereal and marmalade. I let it wait a bit so she could smell it.

  Then I said, I don’t expect you to understand me, I don’t expect you to love me like most people, I just want you to try and understand me as much as you can and like me a little if you can.

  She didn’t move.

  I said, I’ll make a bargain. I’ll tell you when you can go away, but only on certain conditions.

  I don’t know why I said it. I knew really I could never let her go away. It wasn’t just a barefaced lie, though. Often I did think she would go away when we agreed, a promise was a promise, etcetera. Other times I knew I couldn’t let her do it.

  She turned then and stared at me. It was the first sign of life she’d shown for three days.

  I said, my conditions are that you eat food and you talk to me like you did at the beginning and don’t try to escape like that.

  “I can never agree to the last.”

  What about the first two, I said. (I thought even if she did promise not to e
scape, I’d still have to take precautions, so it was pointless, that condition.)

  “You haven’t said when,” she said.

  In six weeks, I said.

  She just turned away again.

  Five weeks then, I said after a bit.

  “I’ll stay here a week and not a day more.”

  Well, I said I couldn’t agree to that and she turned away again. Then she was crying. I could see her shoulders moving, I wanted to go up to her, I did near the bed but she turned so sharp I think she thought I was going to attack her. Full of tears her eyes were. Cheeks wet. It really upset me to see her like that.

  Please be reasonable. You know what you are to me now; can’t you see I haven’t made all these arrangements just so you’d stay a week more?

  “I hate you, I hate you.”

  I’ll give you my word, I said. When the time’s up you can go as soon as you like.

  She wouldn’t have it. It was funny, she sat there crying and staring at me, her face was all pink. I thought she was going to come at me again, she looked as if she wanted to. But then she began to dry her eyes. Then she lit a cigarette. And then she said, “Two weeks.”

  I said, you say two, I say five. I’ll agree to a month. That’d be November the fourteenth.

  There was a pause, and she said, “Four weeks is November the eleventh.”

  I was worried about her, I wanted to clinch it, so I said, I meant a calendar month, but make it twenty-eight days. I’ll give you the odd three days, I said.

  “Thank you very much.” Sarcastic, of course.

  I handed her a cup of coffee, which she took.

  “I’ve some conditions too,” she said before she drunk it. “I can’t live all the time down here. I must have some fresh air and light. I must have a bath sometimes. I must have some drawing materials. I must have a radio or a record-player. I need things from the chemist. I must have fresh fruit and salads. I must have some sort of exercise.”

  If I let you go outside, you’ll escape, I said.

  She sat up. She must have been acting it up a bit before, she changed so quickly. “Do you know what on parole means?”