The Collector

by John Fowles

  We’re both terrible lookers-through. We can’t help it. But she’s always said, I believe this, I shall act like this. It’s got to be someone you at least feel is your equal, who can look through as well as you. And the body thing’s always got to be second. And I’ve always secretly thought, Carmen will be another spinster. It’s too complicated for set ideas.

  But now I think of G.P. and I compare him to Piers. And Piers has got nothing on his side. Just a golden body throwing stones aimlessly into the sea.

  November 5th

  I gave him hell tonight.

  I started throwing things around upstairs. First cushions and then plates. I’ve been longing to break them.

  But I was beastly, really. Spoilt. He suffered it all. He’s so weak. He ought to have slapped me across the face.

  He did catch hold of me, to stop me breaking another of his wretched plates. We so rarely touch. I hated it. It was like icy water.

  I lectured him. I told him all about himself and what he ought to do in life. But he doesn’t listen. He likes me to talk about him. It doesn’t matter what I say.

  I won’t write any more. I’m reading Sense and Sensibility and I must find out what happens to Marianne. Marianne is me; Eleanor is me as I ought to be.

  What happens if he has a crash? A stroke. Anything.

  I die.

  I couldn’t get out. All I did the day before yesterday was to prove it.

  November 6th

  It’s afternoon. No lunch.

  Another escape. So nearly, it seemed at one point. But it never was. He’s a devil.

  I tried the appendicitis trick. I thought of it weeks ago. I’ve always thought of it as a sort of last resort. Something I must not bungle through unpreparedness. I didn’t write about it here, in case he found this.

  I rubbed talc into my face. Then when he knocked on the door this morning I swallowed a whole lot of saved-up salt and water and pressed my tongue and the timing was perfect, he came in and saw me being sick. I put on a tremendous act. Lying on the bed with my hair in a mess and holding my tummy. Still in my pyjamas and dressing-gown. Groaning a little, as if I was being terribly brave. All the time he stood and said, what’s wrong, what’s wrong? And we had a sort of desperate broken conversation, Caliban trying to get out of taking me to hospital, I insisting that he must. And then suddenly he seemed to give way. He muttered something about it being “the end” and rushed out.

  I heard the iron door go (I was still staring at the wall) but no bolts. Then the outer door. And there was silence. It was weird. So sudden, so complete. It had worked. I pulled on some socks and shoes and ran to the iron door. It had sprung back an inch or two—was open. I thought it might be all a trap. So I kept up the act, I opened the door and said his name in a quiet voice and hobbled weakly across the cellar and up the steps. I could see the light, he hadn’t locked the outer door, either. It flashed across my mind that it was just what he would do, he wouldn’t go to the doctor. He’d run away. Crack up completely. But he’d take the van. So I would hear the engine. But I couldn’t. I must have waited several minutes, I should have known but I couldn’t bear the suspense. I pulled the door open and rushed out. And he was there. At once. In all the daylight.

  Waiting.

  I couldn’t pretend I was ill. I’d put shoes on. He had something (a hammer?) in his hand, peculiar wide eyes, I’m sure he was going to attack me. We sort of stood poised for a moment, neither of us knowing what to do. Then I turned and ran back. I don’t know why, I didn’t stop to think. He came after me, but he stopped when he saw me go inside (as I instinctively knew he would—the only safe place from him was down here). I heard him come and the bolts were shot to.

  I know it was the right thing to do. It saved my life. If I had screamed or tried to escape he would have battered me to death. There are moments when he is possessed, quite out of his own control.

  His trick.

  (Midnight.) He brought me supper down here. He didn’t say a word. I’d spent the afternoon doing a strip cartoon of him. The Awful Tale of a Harmless Boy. Absurd. But I have to keep the reality and the horror at bay. He starts by being a nice little clerk ends up as a drooling horror-film monster.

  When he was going I showed it to him. He didn’t laugh, he simply looked at it carefully.

  It’s only natural, he said. He meant, that I should make such fun of him.

  I am one in a row of specimens. It’s when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it’s the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead. I felt it terribly strong today. That my being alive and changing and having a separate mind and having moods and all that was becoming a nuisance.

  He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day what he called his killing-bottle. I’m imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it’s all an illusion.

  A thick round wall of glass.

  November 7th

  How the days drag. Today. Intolerably long.

  My one consolation is G.P.’s drawing. It grows on me. On one. It’s the only living, unique, created thing here. It’s the first thing I look at when I wake up, the last thing at night. I stand in front of it and stare at it. I know every line. He made a fudge of one of her feet. There’s something slightly unbalanced about the whole composition, as if there’s a tiny bit missing somewhere. But it lives.

  After supper (we’re back to normal) Caliban handed me The Catcher in the Rye and said, I’ve read it. I knew at once by his tone that he meant—“and I don’t think much of it.”

  I feel awake, I’ll do a dialogue.

  M. Well?

  C. I don’t see much point in it.

  M. You realize this is one of the most brilliant studies of adolescence ever written?

  C. He sounds a mess to me.

  M. Of course he’s a mess. But he realizes he’s a mess, he tries to express what he feels, he’s a human being for all his faults. Don’t you even feel sorry for him?

  C. I don’t like the way he talks.

  M. I don’t like the way you talk. But I don’t treat you as below any serious notice or sympathy.

  C. I suppose it’s very clever. To write like that and all.

  M. I gave you that book to read because I thought you would feel identified with him. You’re a Holden Caulfield. He doesn’t fit anywhere and you don’t.

  C. I don’t wonder, the way he goes on. He doesn’t try to fit.

  M. He tries to construct some sort of reality in his life, some sort of decency.

  C. It’s not realistic. Going to a posh school and his parents having money. He wouldn’t behave like that. In my opinion.

  M. I know what you are. You’re the Old Man of the Sea.

  C. Who’s he?

  M. The horrid old man Sinbad had to carry on his back. That’s what you are. You get on the back of everything vital, everything trying to be honest and free, and you bear it down.

  I won’t go on. We argued—no, we don’t argue, I say things and he tries to wriggle out of them.

  It’s true. He is the Old Man of the Sea. I can’t stand stupid people like Caliban, with their great deadweight of pettiness and selfishness and meanness of every kind. And the few have to carry it all. The doctors and the teachers and the artists—not that they haven’t their traitors, but what hope there is, is with them—with us.

  Because I’m one of them.

  I’m one of them. I feel it and I’ve tried to prove it. I felt it during my last year at Ladymont. There were the few of us who cared, and there were the silly ones, the snobbish ones, the would-be debutantes and the daddy’s darlings and the horsophiles and the sex-cats. I’ll never go back to Ladymont. Because I couldn’t stand that suffocating atmosphere of the “done” thing and the “right” people and
the “nice” behaviour. (Boadicaea writing “in spite of her weird political views” on my report—how dared she?) I will not be an old girl of such a place.

  Why should we tolerate their beastly Calibanity? Why should every vital and creative and good person be martyred by the great universal stodge around?

  In this situation I’m a representative.

  A martyr. Imprisoned, unable to grow. At the mercy of this resentment, this hateful millstone envy of the Calibans of this world. Because they all hate us, they hate us for being different, for not being them, for their own not being like us. They persecute us, they crowd us out, they send us to Coventry, they sneer at us, they yawn at us, they blindfold themselves and stuff up their ears. They do anything to avoid having to take notice of us and respect us. They go crawling after the great ones among us when they’re dead. They pay thousands and thousands for the Van Goghs and Modiglianis they’d have spat on at the time they were painted. Guffawed at. Made coarse jokes about.

  I hate them.

  I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and the mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren’t ashamed of being dull and little. I hate what G.P. calls the New People, the new-class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitation of the bourgeoisie.

  I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

  G.P. was laughing at my being Labour one day (early on). I remember he said, you are supporting the party which brought the New People into existence—do you realize that?

  I said (I was shocked, because from what he had said about other things, I thought he must be Labour, I knew he had been a Communist once), I’d rather we had the New People than poor people.

  He said, the New People are still the poor people. Theirs is the new form of poverty. The others hadn’t any money and these haven’t any soul.

  He suddenly said, have you read Major Barbara?

  How it proved people had to be saved financially before you could save their souls.

  They forgot one thing, he said. They brought in the Welfare State, but they forgot Barbara herself. Affluence, affluence, and not a soul to see.

  I know he’s wrong somewhere (he was exaggerating). One must be on the Left. Every decent person I’ve ever met has been anti-Tory. But I see what he feels, I mean I feel it myself more and more, this awful deadweight of the fat little New People on everything. Corrupting everything. Vulgarizing everything. Raping the countryside, as D says in his squire moods. Everything mass-produced. Mass-everything.

  I know we’re supposed to face the herd, control the stampede—it’s like a Wild West film. Work for them and tolerate them. I shall never go to the Ivory Tower, that’s the most despicable thing, to choose to leave life because it doesn’t suit you. But sometimes it is frightening, thinking of the struggle life is if one takes it seriously.

  All this is talk. Probably I shall meet someone and fall in love with him and marry him and things will seem to change and I shan’t care any more. I shall become a Little Woman. One of the enemy.

  But this is what I feel these days. That I belong to a sort of band of people who have to stand against all the rest. I don’t know who they are—famous men, dead and living, who’ve fought for the right things and created and painted in the right way, and unfamous people I know who don’t lie about things, who try not to be lazy, who try to be human and intelligent. Yes, people like G.P., for all his faults. His Fault.

  They’re not even good people. They have weak moments. Sex moments and drink moments. Coward and money moments. They have holidays in the Ivory Tower. But a part of them is one with the band.

  The Few.

  November 9th

  I’m vain. I’m not one of them. I want to be one of them, and that’s not the same thing.

  Of course, Caliban is not typical of the New People. He’s hopelessly out of date (he will call the record-player, the “gramophone”). And there’s his lack of confidence. They’re not ashamed of themselves. I remember D saying they think they’re all equal to the best as soon as they have a telly and a car. But deep down Caliban’s one of them—there’s this hatred of the unusual, this wanting everybody to be the same. And the awful misuse of money. Why should people have money if they don’t know how to use it?

  It sickens me every time I think of all the money Caliban has won; and of all the other people like him who win money.

  So selfish, so evil.

  G.P. said, that day, the honest poor are the moneyless vulgar rich. Poverty forces them to have good qualities and pride in other things besides money. Then when they have money they don’t know what to do with it. They forget all the old virtues, which weren’t real virtues anyway. They think the only virtue is to make more money and to spend. They can’t imagine that there are people to whom money is nothing. That the most beautiful things are quite independent of money.

  I’m not being frank. I still want money. But I know that it’s wrong. I believe G.P.—I don’t have to believe him when he says it, I can see it’s true—he hardly worries about money at all. He has just enough to buy his materials, to live, to have a working holiday every year, to manage. And there’re a dozen others—Peter. Bill McDonald. Stefan. They don’t live in the world of money. If they have it they spend it. If they don’t they go without.

  Persons like Caliban have no head for money. They’ve only got to have a little, like the New People, and they become beastly. All the horrid people who wouldn’t give me money when I was collecting. I could tell, I only had to look in their faces. Bourgeois people give because they’re embarrassed if you pester them. Intelligent people give or at least they look honestly at you and say no. They’re not ashamed not to give. But the New People are too mean to give and too small to admit it. Like the horrid man in Hampstead (he was one of them) who said, I’ll give you half a dollar if you can prove it doesn’t go into someone’s pocket. He thought he was being funny.

  I turned my back on him, which was wrong, because my pride was less important than the children. So I put a half-crown in for him later.

  But I still hate him.

  With Caliban it’s as if somebody made him drink a whole bottle of whisky. He can’t take it. The only thing that kept him decent before was being poor. Being stuck to one place and one job.

  It’s like putting a blind man in a fast car and telling him to drive where and how he likes.

  A nice thing to end with. The Bach record came today, I’ve played it twice already. Caliban said it was nice, but he wasn’t “musical.” However, he sat with the right sort of expression on his face. I’m going to play the parts I like again. I’m going to lie in bed in the darkness and the music and think I’m with G.P. and he’s lying over there with his eyes shut and his pitted cheek and his Jew’s nose; as if he was on his own tomb. Only there’s nothing of death in him.

  Even so. This evening Caliban was late coming down.

  Where’ve you been, I snapped at him. He just looked surprised, said nothing. I said, you seem so late.

  Ridiculous. I wanted him to come. I often want him to come. I’m as lonely as that.

  November 10th

  We had an argument this evening about his money. I said he ought to give most of it away. I tried to shame him into giving some away. But he won’t trust anything. That’s what’s really wrong with him. Like my man in Hampstead, he doesn’t trust people to collect money and use it for the purpose they say they will. He thinks everyone is corrupt, everyone tries to get money and keep it.

  It’s no good my saying I know it’s used for the right purpose. He says, how do you know? And of course I can’t tell him. I can only say I feel sure—it must go where it’s needed. Then he smiles as if
I’m too naïve to have any right on my side.

  I accused him (not very bitterly) of not having sent the CND cheque. I challenged him to produce a receipt. He said the gift was anonymous, he hadn’t sent his address. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, I shall go and find out when I’m free. But I didn’t. Because it would be one more reason for him not to set me free. He was red, I’m sure he was lying, as he lied about the letter to D and M.

  It’s not so much a lack of generosity—a real miserliness. I mean (forgetting the absurdity of the situation), he is generous to me. He spends hundreds of pounds on me. He’d kill me with kindness. With chocolates and cigarettes and food and flowers. I said I’d like some French perfume the other evening—it was just a whim, really, but this room smells of disinfectant and Airwick. I have enough baths, but I don’t feel clean. And I said I wished I could go and sniff the various scents to see which I liked best. He came in this morning with fourteen different bottles. He’d ransacked all the chemists’ shops. It’s mad. Forty pounds’ worth. It’s like living in the Arabian Nights. Being the favourite in the harem. But the one perfume you really want is freedom.

  If I could put a starving child before him and give it food and let him watch it grow well, I know he’d give money. But everything beyond what he pays for and sees himself get is suspicious to him. He doesn’t believe in any other world but the one he lives in and sees. He’s the one in prison; in his own hateful narrow present world.

  November 12th

  The last night but one. I daren’t think about it, about not escaping. I’ve kept reminding him, recently. But now I feel I should have sprung it on him more or less suddenly. Today I decided that I would organize a little party tomorrow night. I shall say I feel differently towards him, that I want to be his friend and lameduck him in London.

  It won’t be altogether a lie, I feel a responsibility towards him that I don’t really understand. I so often hate him, I think I ought to forever hate him. Yet I don’t always. My pity wins, and I do want to help him. I think of people I could introduce him to. He could go to Caroline’s psychiatrist friend. I’d be like Emma and arrange a marriage for him, and with happier results. Some little Harriet Smith, with whom he could be mousy and sane and happy.