The Collector

 It was not just jealousy. It was that someone like G.P. could be so close to someone like her -- someone so real and someone so shallow, so phoney, so loose. But why should he have considered me at all? There's not a single reason.

 He's twenty-one years older than I am. Nine years younger than D.

 For days afterwards it wasn't G.P. I was disgusted with, but myself. At my narrow-mindedness. I forced myself to meet, to listen to Toinette. She didn't crow at all. I think that must have been G.P.'s doing. He ordered her not to.

 She went back the next day. She said it was to say she was sorry. And (her words), "It just happened."

 I was so jealous. They made me feel older than they were. They were like naughty children. Happy-with-a-secret. Then that I was frigid. I couldn't bear to see G.P. In the end, it must have been a week later, he rang me up again one evening at Caroline's. He didn't sound guilty. I said I was too busy to see him. I wouldn't go round that evening, no. If he had pressed, I would have refused. But he seemed to be about to ring off, and I said I'd go round the next day. I so wanted him to know I was hurt. You can't be hurt over a telephone.

 Caroline said, I think you're seeing too much of him.

 I said, he's having an _affaire_ with that Swedish girl.

 We even had a talk about it. I was very fair. I defended him. But in bed I lay and accused him to myself. For hours.

 The first thing he said the next day was (no pretending) -- has she been a bitch to you?

 I said, no. Not at all. Then, as if I didn't care, why should she?

 He smiled. I know what you're feeling, he seemed to say. It made me want to slap his face. I couldn't look as if I didn't care, which made it worse.

 He said, men are vile.

 I said, the vilest thing about them is that they can say that with a smile on their faces.

 That is true, he said. And there was silence. I wished I hadn't come, I wished I'd cut him out of my life. I looked at the bedroom door. It was ajar, I could see the end of the bed.

 I said, I'm not able to put life in compartments yet. That's all.

 Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that?

 He was only saying what I felt. I was stiff and he was supple, and it ought to be the other way round. The fault all mine. But I kept on thinking, he took me to the concert, and he came back here to her. I remembered times when I rang the bell and there had been no answer. I see now it was all sexual jealousy, but then it seemed a betrayal of principles. (I still don't know -- it's all muddled in my mind. I can't judge.)

 I said, I'd like to hear Ravi Shankar. I couldn't say, I forgive you.

 So we listened to that. Then played chess. And he beat me. No reference to Toinette, except at the very end, on the stairs, when he said, it's all over now.

 I didn't say anything.

 She only did it for fun, he said.

 But it was never the same. It was a sort of truce. I saw him a few times more, but never alone, I wrote him two letters when I was in Spain, and he sent a postcard back. I saw him once at the beginning of this month. But I'll write about that another time. And I'll write about the strange talk I had with the Nielsen woman.

 Something Toinette said. She said, he talked about his boys and I felt so sorry for him. How they used to ask him not to go to their posh prep school, but to meet them in the town. Ashamed to have him seen. How Robert (at Marl-borough) patronizes him now.

 He never talked to me about them. Perhaps he secretly thinks I belong to the same world.

 A little middle-class boarding-school prig.

 (Evening.) I tried to draw G.P. from memory again today. Hopeless.

 C sat reading _The Catcher in the Rye_ after supper. Several times I saw him look to see how many pages more he had to read.

 He reads it only to show me how hard he is trying.

 I was passing the front door tonight (bath) and I said, well, thank you for a lovely evening, goodbye now. And I made as if to open the door. It was locked, of course. It seems stuck, I said. And he didn't smile, he just stood watching me. I said, It's only a joke. I know, he said. It's very peculiar -- he made me feel a fool. Just by not smiling.