The Collector

 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 lite 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.

 It's her own fault. She shouldn't insist on being called Caroline and treated like a girl in so many ways. I can't respect her as an aunt. As a giver of advice.

 Everything's changing. I keep on thinking of him: of things he said and I said, and how we neither of us really understood what the other meant. No, he understood, I think. He counts possibilities so much faster than I can. I'm growing up so quickly down here. Like a mushroom. Or is it that I've lost my sense of balance? Perhaps it's all a dream. I jab myself with the pencil. But perhaps that's a dream, too.

 If he came to the door now I should run into his arms. I should want him to hold my hand for weeks. I mean I believe I _could_ love him in the other way, his way, now.

    _October 23rd_

 The curse is with me. I'm a bitch to C. No mercy. It's the lack of privacy on top of everything else. I made him let me walk in the cellar this morning. I think I could hear a tractor working. And sparrows. So daylight, sparrows. An aeroplane. I was crying.

 My emotions are all topsy-turvy, like frightened monkeys in a cage. I felt I was going mad last night, so I wrote and wrote and wrote myself into the other world. To escape in spirit, if not in fact. To prove it still exists.

 I've been making sketches for a painting I shall do when I'm free. A view of a garden through a door. It sounds silly in words. But I see it as something very special, all black, umber, dark, dark grey, mysterious angular forms in shadow leading to the distant soft honey-whitish square of the light-filled door. A sort of horizontal shaft.