The Collector

I think of paintings I shall do.

Last night I thought of one, it was a sort of butter-yellow (farm-butter-yellow) field rising to a white luminous sky and the sun just rising. A strange rose-pink, I knew it exactly, full of hushed stillness, the beginning of things, lark-song without larks.

Two strange contradictory dreams.

The first one was very simple. I was walking in the fields, I don’t know who I was with, but it was someone I liked very much, a man. G.P. perhaps. The sun shining on young corn. And suddenly we saw swallows flying low over the corn. I could see their backs gleaming, like dark blue silk. They were very low, twittering all around us, all flying in the same direction, low and happy. And I felt full of happiness. I said, how extraordinary, look at the swallows. It was very simple, the unexpected swallows and the sun and the green corn. I was filled with happiness. The purest spring feeling. Then I woke up.

Later I had another dream. I was at the window on the first floor of a large house (Ladymont?) and there was a black horse below. It was angry, but I felt safe because it was below and outside. But suddenly it turned and galloped at the house and to my horror it leapt gigantically up and straight at me with bared teeth. It came crashing through the window. Even then I thought, it will kill itself, I am safe. But it sprawled and flailed round in the small room and I suddenly realized it was going to attack me. There was nowhere to escape. I woke again, I had to put on the light.

It was violence. It was all I hate and all I fear.

December 4th

I shan’t go on keeping a diary when I leave here. It’s not healthy. It keeps me sane down here, gives me somebody to talk to. But it’s vain. You write what you want to hear.

It’s funny. You don’t do that when you draw yourself. No temptation to cheat.

It’s sick, sick, all this thinking about me. Morbid.

I long to paint and paint other things. Fields, southern houses, landscapes, vast wide-open things in vast wide-open light.

It’s what I’ve been doing today. Moods of light recalled from Spain. Ochre walls burnt white in the sunlight. The walls of Avila. Cordoba courtyards. I don’t try to reproduce the place, but the light of the place.

Fiat lux.

I’ve been playing the Modern Jazz Quartet’s records over and over again. There’s no night in their music, no smoky dives. Bursts and sparkles and little fizzes of light, starlight, and sometimes high noon, tremendous everywhere light, like chandeliers of diamonds floating in the sky.

December 5th

G.P.

The Rape of Intelligence. By the moneyed masses, the New People.

Things he says. They shock you, but you remember them. They stick. Hard, meant to last.

I’ve been doing skyscapes all day. I just draw a line an inch from the bottom. That’s the earth. Then I think of nothing but the sky. June sky, December, August, spring-rain, thunder, dawn, dusk. I’ve done dozens of skies. Pure sky, nothing else. Just the simple line and the skies above.

A strange thought: I would not want this not to have happened. Because if I escape I shall be a completely different and I think better person. Because if I don’t escape, if something dreadful happened, I shall still know that the person I was and would have stayed if this hadn’t happened was not the person I now want to be.

It’s like firing a pot. You have to risk the cracking and the warping.

Caliban’s very quiet. A sort of truce.

I’m going to ask to go up tomorrow. I want to see if he’s actually doing anything.

Today I asked him to bind me and gag me and let me sit at the foot of the cellar steps with the door out open. In the end he agreed. So I could look up and see the sky. A pale grey sky. I saw birds fly across, pigeons, I think. I heard outside sounds. This is the first proper daylight I’ve seen for two months. It lived. It made me cry.

December 6th

I’ve been up for a bath and we’ve been looking at the room I shall occupy. He has done some things. He’s going to see if he can’t find an antique Windsor chair. I drew it for him.

It’s made me feel happy.

I’m restless. I can’t write here. I feel half-escaped already.

The thing that made me feel he was more normal was this little bit of dialogue.

M. (we were standing in the room) Why don’t you just let me come and live up here as your guest? If I gave you my word of honour?

C. If fifty people came to me, real honest respectable people, and swore blind you wouldn’t escape, I wouldn’t trust them. I wouldn’t trust the whole world.

M. You can’t go all through life trusting no one.

C. You don’t know what being alone is.

M. What do you think I’ve been these last two months?

C. I bet a lot of people think about you. Miss you. I might be dead for all anyone I knew ever cared.

M. Your aunt.

C. Her.

(There was a silence.)

C. (he suddenly burst out with it) You don’t know what you are. You’re everything. I got nothing if you go.

(And there was a great silence.)

December 7th

He’s bought the chair. He brought it down. It’s nice. I wouldn’t have it down here. I don’t want anything from down here. A complete change.

Tomorrow I’m going upstairs for good. I asked him afterwards, last night. And he agreed. I haven’t got to wait the whole week.

He’s gone into Lewes to buy more things for the room. We’re going to have a celebration supper.

He’s been much nicer, these last two days.

I’m not going to lose my head and try and rush out at the first chance. He’ll watch me, I know. I can’t imagine what he’ll do. The window will be boarded and he’ll lock the door. But there’ll be ways of seeing daylight. Sooner or later there’ll be a chance (if he doesn’t let me go of his own accord) to run for it.

But I know it will be only one chance. If he caught me escaping he’d put me straight back down here.

So it must be a really good chance. A sure one.

I tell myself I must prepare for the worst.

But something about him makes me feel that this time he will do what he has said.

I’ve caught his cold. It doesn’t matter.

Oh my God my God I could kill myself.

He’s going to kill me with despair.

I’m still down here. He never meant it.

He wants to take photographs. That’s his secret. He wants to take my clothes off and . . . oh God I never knew till now what loathing was.

He said unspeakable things to me. I was a street-woman, I asked for what he suggested.

I went mad with rage. I threw a bottle of ink at him.

He said that if I didn’t do it he’d stop me having baths or going out in the cellar. I’ll be here all the time.

The hate between us. It came seething out.

I’ve caught his wretched cold. I can’t think straight.

I couldn’t kill myself, I’m too angry with him.

He’s always abused me. From the very beginning. That story about the dog. He uses my heart. Then turns