by John Fowles
If I had a fairy godmother—please, make G.P. twenty years younger. And please, make him physically attractive to me.
How he would despise that!
It’s odd (and I feel a little guilty) but I have been feeling happier today than at any time since I came here. A feeling—all will turn out for the best. Partly because I did something this morning. I tried to escape. Then, Caliban has accepted it. I mean if he was going to attack me, he’d surely do it at some time when he had a reason to be angry. As he was this morning. He has tremendous self-control, in some ways.
I know I also feel happy because I’ve been not here for most of the day. I’ve been mainly thinking about G.P. In his world, not this one here. I remembered so much. I would have liked to write it all down. I gorged myself on memories. This world makes that world seem so real, so living, so beautiful. Even the sordid parts of it.
And partly, too, it’s been a sort of indulging in wicked vanity about myself. Remembering things G.P. has said to me, and other people. Knowing I am rather a special person. Knowing I am intelligent, knowing that I am beginning to understand life much better than most people of my age. Even knowing that I shall never be so stupid as to be vain about it, but be grateful, be terribly glad (especially after this) to be alive, to be who I am—Miranda, and unique.
I shall never let anyone see this. Even if it is the truth, it must sound vain.
Just as I never let other girls see that I know I am pretty; nobody knows how I’ve fallen over myself not to take that unfair advantage. Wandering male eyes, even the nicest, I’ve snubbed.
Minny: one day when I’d been gushing about her dress when she was going out to a dance. She said, shut up. You’re so pretty you don’t even have to try.
G.P. saying, you’ve every kind of face.
Wicked.
October 21st
I’m making him cook better. Absolute ban on frozen food. I must have fruit, green vegetables. I have steak. Salmon. I ordered him to get caviare yesterday. It irritates me that I can’t think of enough rare foods I haven’t had and have wanted to have.
Pig.
Caviare is wonderful.
I’ve had another bath. He daren’t refuse, I think he thinks “ladies” fall down dead if they don’t have a bath when they want one.
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.
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, although 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.
He said, she always irritates me. I knew he didn’t want to talk about it. As we went towards the platform, I said, she’s frightened of seeming behind the times.
Aren’t you? — and he gave me one of his dry little smiles. I thought, he doesn’t like me playing at “us” against “her.”
We were passing a film poster and he said, that’s a good film. Have you seen it? Do.
When we came out on the platform, he said, come round one day. But leave your bloody aunt at home. And he smiled. A little infectious mischievous smile. Not his age, at all. Then he walked off. So by-himself. So indifferent.
So I did go round. One Saturday morning. He was surprised. I had to sit in silence for twenty minutes with him and the weird Indian music. He got straight back on to the divan and lay with his eyes shut, as if I shouldn’t have come and I felt I ought never to have come (especially without telling C), and I felt as well that it really was a bit much, a pose. I couldn’t relax. At the end he asked me about myself, curtly, as if it was all rather a bore. And I stupidly tried to impress him. Do the one thing I shouldn’t. Show off. I kept on thinking, he didn’t really mean me to come round.
Suddenly he cut me short and took me round the room and made me look at things.
His studio. The most beautiful room. I always feel happy there. Everything in harmony. Everything expressing only him (it’s not deliberate, he hates “interior decoration” and gimmicks and Vogue). But it’s all him. Toinette, with her silly female House and Garden ideas of austere good taste, calling it “cluttered.” I could have bitten her head off. The feeling that someone lives all his life in it, works in it, thinks in it, is it.
And we thawed out. I stopped trying to be clever.
He showed me how he gets his “haze” effect. Tonksing gouache. With all his little home-made tools.
Some friends of his came in, Barber and Frances Cruikshank. He said, this is Miranda Grey I can’t stand her aunt, all in one breath, and they laughed, they were old friends. I wanted to leave. But they were going for a walk, they had come in to make him go with them, and they wanted me to go too. Barber Cruikshank did; he had special seduction eyes for me.
Supposing aunt sees us, G.P. said. Barber’s got the foulest reputation in Cornwall.
I said, she’s my aunt. Not my duenna.
So we all went to the Vale of Health pub and then on to Kenwood. Frances told me about their life in Cornwall and I felt for the first time in my life that I was among people of an older generation that I understood, real people. And at the same time I couldn’t help seeing Barber was a bit of a sham. All those funny malicious stories. While G.P. was the one who led us into all the serious things. I don’t mean that he wasn’t gay, too. Only he has this strange twist of plunging straight into what matters. Once when he was away getting drinks, Barber asked me how long I’d known G.P. Then he said, I wish to God I’d met someone like G.P. when I was a student. And quiet little Frances said, we think he’s the most wonderful person. He’s one of the few. She didn’t say which few, but I knew what she meant.
At Kenwood G.P. made us split. He took me straight to the Rembrandt and talked about it, without lowering his voice, and I had the smallness to be embarrassed because some other people there stared at us. I thought, we must look like father and daughter. He told me all about the background to the picture, what Rembrandt probably felt like at that time, what he was trying to say, how he said it. As if I knew nothing about art. As if he was trying to get rid of a whole cloud of false ideas I probably had about it.
We went out to wait for the others. He said, that picture moves me very much. And he looked at
me, as if he thought I might laugh. One of those flashes of shyness he has.
I said, it moves me now, too.
But he grinned. It can’t possibly. Not for years yet.
How do you know?
He said, I suppose there are people who are purely moved by great art. I never met a painter who was. I’m not. All I think of when I see that picture is that it has the supreme mastery I have spent all my life trying to attain. And shall not. Ever. You’re young. You can understand. But you can’t feel that yet.
I said, I think I do.
He said, then that’s bad. You should be blind to failure. At your age. Then he said, don’t try to be our age. I shall despise you if you do.
He said, you’re like a kid trying to see over a six-foot wall.
That was the first time. He hated me for attracting him. The Professor Higgins side of him.
Later, when the Cruikshanks came out, he said, as they walked towards us, Barber’s a womanizer. Refuse to meet him if he asks.
I gave him a surprised look. He said, smiling at them, not you, I can’t stand the pain for Frances.
Back in Hampstead I left them and went on home. All the way back there I’d realized that G.P. was making sure Barber Cruikshank and I shouldn’t be left alone. They (Barber) asked me to come to see them if I was ever in Cornwall.
G.P. said, see you one day. As if he didn’t care whether he did or not.
I told Caroline I’d met him by chance. He had said he was sorry (lie). If she’d rather I didn’t see him, I wouldn’t. But I found him very stimulating to be with, full of ideas, I needed to meet such people. It was too bad of me, I knew she would do the decent thing if I put it like that. I was my own mistress—and so on.
And then she said, darling, you know I’m the last person to be a prude, but his reputation … there must be fire, there’s so much smoke.
I said, I’d heard about it. I could look after myself.